Obituaries
Please alert us to the recent death of any other Rhodes Scholar by emailing communications@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk.
Kenneth Keniston was born in Chicago. He enrolled in Harvard College, and later earned a Rhodes Scholarship to complete his D. Phil in social studies from Balliol College. Keniston taught at Harvard University and Yale University before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty in 1977, where he served as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Human Development. Keniston and his wife Suzanne Berger both received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979.
James George was educated at Upper Canada College, and Trinity College of the University of Toronto (philosophy), and was a Rhodes Scholar. A strong pacifist, and President of the Student Christian Movement, he was led by the disasters of 1940 to enlist in the Navy, surviving a torpedoing and rising to Lt-Commander and naval historian. In 1945 he entered Canada’s Foreign Service to work for peace, with postings to Greece, United Nations, NATO and France, and ambassadorial postings to Sri Lanka; India & Nepal; and Iran & Kuwait.
After retiring in 1977, he co-founded and headed the Sadat Peace Foundation and the Threshold Foundation. His environmental work included key roles in the whaling moratorium (1980), stopping the Kuwait oil fires (1991), and the No Weapons in Space initiative.
George Steiner, a literary polymath and man of letters whose voluminous criticism often dealt with the paradox of literature’s moral power and its impotence in the face of an event like the Holocaust, died at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 90.
After receiving his master’s degree from Harvard in 1950, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He received his doctorate in English literature in 1955.
That same year he married Zara Alice Shakow, who became a historian of international relations. In addition to his son, his wife survives him along with a daughter, Deborah Tarn, who is a philologist, and two grandchildren.
In 1952, Mr. Steiner joined the editorial staff of The Economist, where he remained until 1956. After obtaining his doctorate, he became a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, then was appointed Christian Gauss Lecturer at Princeton from 1959 to 1960. From Princeton he went to Cambridge University, where he remained for the rest of his life, first as a fellow of Churchill College (1961-1969), then as an Extraordinary Fellow. He was an honorary fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.
At various times he also taught or lectured at the University of Geneva, New York University and Harvard, where he was appointed the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry for 2001-2002.
Andrew Savitz (Maryland & New College 1975) passed away on 29 January 2020. Andrew studied PPE as a Rhodes Scholar in 1975 and went on to Georgetown Law School. Andrew will be remembered for many things, not least of all his strength, wisdom, good humour, and ability to bring joy to those who knew him.
Clayton M. Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School whose groundbreaking 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” outlined his theories about the impact of what he called “disruptive innovation”, died on Thursday at a hospital in Boston. He was 67.
Clayton studied Applied Econometrics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar from 1975, graduated from Harvard Business School, and joined the Harvard Business School’s faculty in 1992. For many years he taught a course called “Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise.” He focused his theories on a wide range of industries, from education to health care. A former basketball star (he stood 6-foot-8) as well as an affable academic, he focused as much on a life well lived as he did on his management theories.
Francis graduated from Prince Edward H.S. in Salisbury and then the University of Cape Town where he received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering. He then received his Ph.D. in physics from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. While at Oxford he was a research associate on Atomic Beams and a Laboratory Instructor - his specialty was in Experimental Atomic Physics and Helium III.
After graduating from Oxford Francis was employed at Yale University in New Haven, Ct., as a researcher in Physics, Associate Professor of physics and was a Junior Faculty Fellowship. Upon leaving Yale, Francis join the Physics faculty at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and whilst there he was made full professor. Francis was a contributor and co-author of many scientific papers and a member of the American Physical Society.
David Stanley Staiger, aged 91, died peacefully on December 10, 2019, at Glacier Hills Senior Living Facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he lived with his beloved wife, Ann. Dave left Port Huron for a year of college at Michigan State before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was a three-year varsity letter winner on the football and track teams. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, in his senior year Dave was awarded both the 1951 Big 10 Medal of Honor and a Rhodes Scholarship. That was the year he also met Ann Seibold, whom he married on August 20, 1954. After two years at New College, Oxford, England and two years in the Army in Georgia, Dave spent three years working toward his Ph.D. in economics at MIT under the guidance of Paul Samuelson. He and his family moved to Washington DC in the summer of 1959 to take a job at the Federal Reserve Board, where Dave helped to install and operationalize the first-ever computer at the Board of Governors.
Robert K. Massie, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who wrote respected biographies of Russian royals, including “Nicholas and Alexandra,” which became a movie. He died on Monday at his home in Irvington, N.Y, at 90 years old.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies at Yale and another degree in Modern History at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before serving in the Navy.
Bill Sterling attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar in 1961 and studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics.