Obituaries

Please alert us to the recent death of any other Rhodes Scholar by emailing communications@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk.

Ray Nichols – a Rhodes scholar, professor and head of the department of politics at Monash University, and a lively contributor to public affairs – has died aged 81.

Ray took his BA (honours) at KU, with a double major in politics and history. He spent three years as a Rhodes scholar at Trinity College, Oxford, being deeply influenced by Wittgenstein, and earning his master’s under the supervision of Isaiah Berlin. From Oxford, he went to Princeton on Woodrow Wilson and Danforth fellowships, and earned his PhD in record time; he won a Danforth post-doctoral fellowship, and, in 1965, he became of the founding fathers of the new University of California campus at Santa Cruz, as a fellow of Cowell College.

Major General George Anthony Rebh was born on September 14, 1921 in Detroit, Michigan. George attended West Point from 1939 to 1943. He secured a Rhodes scholarship and earned a BA and MA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at Oxford from 1947 to 1950. He organised the university's first basketball team serving as player, captain and coach to play goodwill games on the Continent (splitting an eight game series with the Czech Olympic team). General Rebh's military career spanned 33 years. He received national recognition for managing major public construction yet he felt he did his best work on military projects few knew about.

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.

Christopher Suits studied Modern Languages (Russian) at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1984.

Robin Plumbridge was born in 1935 in Cape Town. Educated at St. Andrews College, he then went onto study at the University of Cape Town. He came to Oxford as a Rhodes School in 1954 to study Maths.

After earning a B.A. from Princeton University, Edwin was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for two years' study at Oxford University. There at New College, Oxford, he received the degrees of B. A. and M.A. in English Language and Literature. On leaving Oxford, he served in the army as an artillery lieutenant (R.O.T.C.) with the 2nd Armored Division in Germany. He treasured a rare opportunity to study under Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Africa. He later received the LL.B. degree from Harvard Law School and practiced law in New York City for three years. He then returned to Princeton, where he earned a Ph.D. in English Literature, after which he taught English at Georgetown University, specialising in Victorian fiction, before retiring in 1974 to pursue further his own writing. Doubleday published his first novel, The Gun and Glory of Granite Hendley, in 1969, after which he went on to write and publish numerous books of stories, poetry, and plays.

Erik Sedman Ronhovde (Age 82) died at his home in Washington, DC on Wednesday, July 10, 2019. In 1959 he received an A.B degree, cum laude, in Slavic Studies from Harvard College. At that time, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and studied International Relations at Queen's College, Oxford. He joined the United States Air Force in 1962 and was assigned as a 1st Lieutenant to teach geography, international relations and defense policy at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado.

In 1966 he was appointed a Career Officer in the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service, serving tours abroad in Berlin, Vienna, Moscow and Budapest. The Foreign Service Institute certified him to be fluent in Russian, German, Swedish, Hungarian, French and Italian, with a working, speaking and reading knowledge of Norwegian, Dutch and Polish.

Hoyt Duggan (Louisiana & Pembroke 1960), retired professor of medieval literature at the University of Virginia, died April 8, 2019 after a long illness. He attended Baylor University and graduated from Centenary College of Louisiana. As a Rhodes Scholar, he studied at Pembroke College. After serving in the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps, he attended Princeton University to pursue a PhD. His published scholarship includes the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, a print edition of The Wars of Alexander, and numerous articles on medieval metrics and editorial practice.

Bill studied Modern History at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and graduated in 1961.