Barbadan Alum Wins Rhodes

Harvard's already record number of Rhodes Scholarship winners grew further when Richard H. Drayton '86, a native of Guyana raised in Barbados, was chosen as the 1988 Rhodes Scholar for the British Caribbean in mid-December.

Drayton graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in History and Science, and began the Ph.D. program in History at Yale University in September 1986. The Rhodes award provides a full scholarship for two years of study at Oxford University in England.

Including Drayton, 12 Harvard students and graduates have won the prestigious award this year. That number breaks the previous record for any American college, which Harvard set in 1966.

Drayton, who is Yale's only Rhodes Scholar this year, laughed and said "they don't even want to claim me. They'd have preferred an undergrad had got it."

Established in 1903 by British colonial diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, the Rhodes program requires applicants to submit an essay and be interviewed twice.

Drayton said he had some reservations about the scholarship because of its origin. He was active in the Southern Africa Solidarity Committee as an undergraduate, said he was among the students who built the plywood Ivory Tower that formed the centerpiece of Harvard Yard's "shantytown" in the spring of 1986.

"I'm just a little bit ambivalent. I'm really grateful for the opportunity the Rhodes scholarship committee is giving me to start work on my dissertation in England, but I am not without some reservations in terms of my sense of where Mr. Rhodes' money came from," Drayton said.

"Mr. Rhodes intended the scholarship as an institution by which a group of young men would be brought together to further the imperialist ascendancy of Great Britain, but I can't accept that commitment," he said.

"But I do believe Mr. Rhodes hoped that he would help produce a generation of people around the world committed to personal excellence and public service, and I hope that I will indeed be able to fulfill that vision," said Drayton.

Drayton said the committee asked him how he felt about taking Rhodes' money at the end of his interview for the scholarship. The Governor-General of Barbados later told Drayton that his response should have been the traditional Barbadian proverb, "If the devil sent it, God must bring it"--that is, even if something appears to come from the devil, it must be God's will.

Drayton said money had made him decide to pursue his graduate studies at Yale.

"Yale offered me two times as much as Harvard. In terms of living, it was a much more realistic and sensible offer," Drayton said. "Harvard's offer wouldn't have allowed me to live in Cambridge."

The award winner said he began his education in a Barbadian school on the British model. He called the system "too rigid," and said it "made the assumption that people at a young age know already what they want to do with the rest of their lives."

"I had first wanted to be a biochemist," Drayton said. "If I had gone to a British university, I would be a very frustrated biochemist. At Harvard, I was free to move towards literature and the humanities."

Drayton said he would perform historical research at Oxford as though he were pursuing a doctorate in Philosophy, but will probably end his Oxford studies midway through the program, and return to Yale to finish the Ph.D.