Malcolm McKenzie was born in Cape Town in 1953 and studied at the University of Cape Town before going on to Oxford to read for a second undergraduate degree in English literature. His career as an educator has included roles as a university lecturer and a teacher and leader in schools, and he has held school headships in the US, China, Japan, the UK, Botswana and Nigeria. From 2013 to 2022, McKenzie was the Founding Head of Keystone Academy in Beijing, which brings together Eastern, Western and international traditions. He continues to serve on educational advisory boards and to write about education and its link to ecology and the environment. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 9 June 2026.
Malcolm McKenzie
Diocesan College, Rondebosch & Oriel 1977
Malcolm McKenzie at Keystone Academy.
Malcolm McKenzie, not long after Oxford.
Malcolm McKenzie in Nigeria.
Malcolm McKenzie in Beijing.
‘I always felt I was on my toes’
I grew up in South Africa, with my parents and my five siblings. My high school was Bishops – the Diocesan College. I did well enough in the entrance exam to go straight into the second year, so I was always younger than the average age in my classes from then on. For some people, that works well, and for others, it doesn’t at all. In my case, it worked extremely well. I always felt I was on my toes.
I played lots of sport, but my main hobbies were collecting shells and stamps. The shells definitely fostered a sense of the beauty of the natural world and an interest, much later on, in the environment and conservation and ecological issues. And I remember being fascinated with stamps because they came from all over the world, so I got to know geography and the names of money in different countries.
I was profoundly influenced by some really outstanding teachers, and it was clear to me that I wanted to major in English literature at university. But my father was a lawyer, and I was also toying with the idea of law. When I went to the University of Cape Town, I took a combination of legal prep subjects and literature and philosophy, and then I decided to drop law in the second year. One of my teachers was John Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning writer, and he had quite a significant influence on my thinking. He just loved being an eccentric, and he had such a wide range of interests. In a way, it gave me permission to indulge my own eccentricities.
On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship
Growing up, I knew about Cecil Rhodes and the Rhodes Scholarships from all different perspectives. My great-grandfather was David Harris, a Jewish pioneer in South Africa who came out from London in 1870. He was one of the founding directors of the De Beers mining company, and a close friend of Rhodes. And, of course, I went to Bishops, which had its own Rhodes Scholarship. The Rhodes Scholarships that the four South African schools have enjoyed have been controversial over the years, and rightly so, in my opinion. The first time I remember them being questioned was in the 1970s. My father was on the council of trustees of Bishops, and he was in favour of the four Scholarships being kept by the schools. Even at that early stage in my life, I was very much against that. But of course, I am a beneficiary. So, I have a complex relationship with the Rhodes Scholarships.
In January 1976, I thought I was going to be drafted to fight in South Africa’s war against the Angolan government. I’d had plans to carry on and do a master’s degree, but I had to leave South Africa quickly. I jumped on a ship from Cape Town to Barcelona and hitchhiked to Switzerland, and then to Paris, where I lived on a boat on the Seine. I visited friends in the UK and actually spoke to one of the admissions tutors in Oxford, who expressed an interest in taking me. It was only in July of 1976 that I went back to South Africa, and that’s when I applied for the Scholarship.
At the University of Cape Town, coming out of a structured and conservative high school, I had just let rip. And I remember saying to the Rhodes Scholarship committee, ‘My school record at Bishops is outstanding. You know that. You can see that. My University of Cape Town record is not as good as it should be. But if you give me the Rhodes Scholarship, I guarantee you I will get a First Class degree in English literature,’ which I did. Nonetheless, I felt surprised and a little overwhelmed at winning the Scholarship.
‘I loved it’
I sailed to the UK on a cruise liner and then drove from Southampton to Oxford. I remember the porter at the gate of Oriel being very surprised and impressed when this young South African drove up in a Land Rover. I chose Oriel because it was small and I liked the location, and also because of the people there, including Glenn Black (St Andrew’s College, Grahamstown & Trinity 1966), who was one of the English dons there. The essential experience of Oxford, for me, was being aware that I was surrounded by incredibly brilliant people. The tutorial – writing essays and studying with just one person, sitting in his or her rooms and talking about your work – was completely novel to me, and I loved it.
Judith and I were married at the end of my first year in Oxford, and we lived in Oxford for my second year. After that, we decided to go back to South Africa. She was majoring in ceramics at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, and I applied for and got a job in the English department there. I was an English lecturer for a few years. Then, through a growing involvement in politics, I became more interested in teaching language. I shifted to the education department and organised language programmes for black Zulu-speaking schoolteachers and heads of school. I wrote to the Rhodes Trust and asked whether I could come back and do a third year of the Scholarship, studying applied linguistics. They agreed, but recommended that I go to the University of Lancaster, which was much more progressive in that particular field at that time, and that is what I did.
“Why are you going to teach in a school?”
I’d promised the education department in Pietermaritzburg that I would go back and develop a course for them, and I did do that. But then, in 1986, we decided we had to leave. I knew people who had been killed for their political involvement, and it just felt too dangerous. So, we moved to Botswana. I went to a school as head of the English department, and Judith came as head of the art department. My university colleagues said, ‘Why are you going to teach in a school? You’re going down in the world,’ and I remember saying to them quite clearly, ‘I’m not actually going down in the world. The work of schoolteachers is much more important than the work we’re doing here.’
I was working more and more with international groups and with schools dedicated to the educational philosophies of Kurt Hahn, who helped start the United World Colleges, the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme and Outward Bound. I found myself at Hotchkiss in the US, and we were very fortunate to be able to bring in all kinds of students from outside the US who wouldn’t have been able to afford a Hotchkiss education or even dream of it. That was very important to me. When I left Hotchkiss, I looked at places where people were starting new schools, and in the end, I decided to go to Beijing. I had become fascinated by China, and I wanted to make an experimental school which blends the best of East, West, and international traditions. It was indeed the most remarkable, magical experience.
‘I didn’t want to be identified with the community I was born into’
Growing up as I did in South Africa as a white South African under Apartheid, I became aware quite early in my childhood that I didn’t want to be identified with the community I was born into. That opened me up to all kinds of other possibilities in global thinking, and I have tried to bring those into education. I have also written and thought a lot about the huge passion that South Africans have for the landscape and the land. I think if you are a dispossessed South African, the fact that the land was taken away from you and it’s such beautiful land means that you identify with it even more strongly. And, whether I like it or not, I am part of that colonial legacy, and somehow, identifying with the beauty of the land is almost an escape from guilt. For me, that finds expression in ecological interests and bringing those into education.
I have never liked the phrase ‘fight the world’s fight’. When I think about it, I change the ‘f’ to an ‘r.’ Humans have a tendency towards fundamentalism. We tend to believe that what we think is right is permanent, and it’s not. I think what Rhodes Scholars should be doing is analysing what seems right to their time and then righting that. So, I prefer to right the world’s right than to fight the world’s fight.
Transcript
Interviewee: Malcolm McKenzie (Diocesan College, Rondebosch & Oriel 1977) [hereafter ‘RES’]
Moderator: Jamie Byron Geller [hereafter ‘INT’]
Date of interview: 9 June 2026
INT: This is Jamie Byron Geller on behalf of the Rhodes Trust and I am here with Malcolm McKenzie, class of 1977 to record Malcolm’s Rhodes Scholar Oral History Project interview. Today’s date is June, 9th 2026. Malcolm we are so grateful to you for joining us in this project. Would you mind please saying your name for the recording?
RES: My name is Malcolm Herbert McKenzie.
INT: Wonderful. And do I have your permission to record this interview?
RES: Absolutely.
INT: Great.
RES: I’m very happy that you are here and please go ahead and record.
INT: Well thank you. So we are having this conversation in lovely Western Connecticut. How long has this part of the world been home for you?
RES: It’s been home since 2007 when I came with my family to the Hotchkiss School as the head and I was here for six years until 2013 at which point I went to the Beijing to help start a school there. But we had fallen in love with the Northwest corner of Connecticut so we bought a house here and we’ve stayed here ever since. This is home base.
INT: Wonderful. And I would love as we move through our conversation to talk about that role in Beijing and beyond.
RES: Sure.
INT: But first going all the way back to the beginning. Where and when were you born Malcolm?
RES: I was born in Cape Town, South Africa, 1953. 22nd December.
INT: And who was part of your household growing up?
RES: My parents and six children. I have five siblings.
INT: Okay.
RES: So there were eight of us. And as was the case in many privileged homes at that time we had people working in our house who lived there as well.
INT: Okay. And where, where do you fall in the kind of from oldest to youngest in your siblings?
RES: I am number three of six.
INT: Number three, okay, so in the middle.
RES: Yeah.
INT: And, and do you- Would you mind sharing a little bit about, you know, we will talk in the course of our conversation a lot about your impact in education and I was wondering if you would mind reflecting on your earliest educational experiences.
RES: I went to a school called Bishops, the Diocesan College. I went to pre-prep school as it was called before I went to Bishops. When I applied to go to Bishops I wrote an entrance exam and as result of the entrance exam I jumped what was called Standard 1 and went straight into Standard 2. So I was always younger than my average age from that moment onwards. And in fact I finished high school at the age of 16.
INT: Oh wow.
RES: And I’m saying that because a really significant part of my educational experience was always being stretched by being the youngest in the class. And for some people that works well. And for others it doesn’t at all. In my case it worked extremely well. I always felt that I was on my toes because I was the youngest.
INT: And was there any kind of particular philosophy around education in your home? How, what was your parents perception of education?
RES: My father was intellectual. My mother different in that regard. My father was a very, very good mathematician. He’d studied, started studying engineering at the University of Cape Town before he joined, he fought in the Second World War. He was a prisoner of war for three and a half years in North Italy and beyond in what was then Czechoslovakia. Captured in North Africa. When he came back after the war to Cape Town he completed his engineering degree which had been interrupted and he lectured in engineering for a few years. But then he decided to study law, so he became an attorney, or an advocate in South African parlance. And he was very focused on academics. My mother was a trained nurse and had a different perspective. But my father always used to check my report card when I came home, old-fashioned, handwritten report cards. And he would look at my Latin grade and my mathematics grade. And if they were fine the world was fine. He didn’t want to look at the others.
INT: Okay.
RES: And Latin in that particular school and within that tradition I started studying in what was called Standard 4, I must have been nine at the time. So I had seven years of Latin at school and then one year at the University of Cape Town.
INT: Okay. And was there-
RES: So a very, very traditional conservative education I would say.
INT: Yeah. Were, you know, you mentioned Latin and math being the subjects that were most important to your dad. Were there particular subjects that you gravitated towards during that time or that you were most passionate about?
RES: English literature and history.
INT: Oh okay. Okay.
RES: It wasn’t that he disparaged the others at all. He just thought that, you know, really high achievement could best be perceived through the lens of Latin and math.
INT: Okay. And what about your time outside of academics? Were there particular hobbies that were important to you growing up?
RES: Lots of sport. A very sporty school. So I played lots of sport. But my main hobbies, and I was thinking about this the other day, I used to collect shells, seashells and stamps avidly. And I’ve been considering the impact that that has had on my life. And I think the shells definitely fostered a sense of beauty in the natural world and an interest much later on through those kinds of things in the environment and conservation and ecological issues. And I remember being fascinated with stamps because they came from all over the world. And they had different currencies. So I got to know geography internationally and the different names of money in different countries through my stamp collection. But I spent money on buying stamps and books of course as well but I spent more money on buying stamps than I could afford and that I should have but that was my main interest in buying things at that time.
INT: That’s such a, it’s such a beautiful reflection about what those two things represent. And right before we started recording you were sharing about two of the things that you were most excited to bring to Hotchkiss. And so really lovely that those represent kind of those two pieces. Did you, you know, with your interest in English literature and history, did you have a sense of the direction that your career might take one day?
RES: No I didn’t. And maybe at the age of 72 and a half, I still don’t. But as I moved through high school I was profoundly influenced by some really outstanding and eccentric history and English teachers. So it was clear to me that I wanted to major in English literature when I went to university. But I also toying with the idea of law. My father was a lawyer. And so when I went to UCT, the University of Cape Town, in my first year I took a combination of legal prep subjects and literature and philosophy. And then I decided to drop the law interest in the second year and went through with English literature and philosophy. And one of my teachers whom I was quite close to at one point was John Coetzee, the Nobel Prize winning writer who was just publishing his first book, Dusklands in 1972 or ’73. And I worked quite closely with him as a student.
INT: Wow. And do you- You know I am conscious that you kindly shared before that your awareness of the Rhodes Scholarship came quite early. And was wondering if you would mind sharing a little bit about your grandfather and that relationship.
RES: Sure. Sure. This is my great-grandfather, a man called David Harris. His full title was Colonel Sir David Harris. He was a Jewish pioneer in South Africa who went to South Africa from London in 1870. He was a first cousin of one of the founders of De Beers, Barney Barnato and in fact Harris persuaded Barnato to come to South Africa from London a year after Harris himself went there. Harris was a close friend of Rhodes, knew him very well. Was one of the founding directors of the De Beers company.
[00:10:00]
And he, Harris wrote a book of his memoirs in the 1930s shortly before he died called Pioneer, Soldier and Politician. Rhodes is mentioned many, many times in there. They were both together in the Siege of Kimberley during the Boer War. Lots of anecdotes about Rhodes in that book. And as I told you a little earlier I’ve got a handwritten note from Rhodes to Harris saying, “Following on the discussion you’ve just had, I authorise you to spend-” I think it was two hundred pounds of De Beers corporate money on this project that they had been talking about. So I knew about Rhodes from all different perspectives growing up. And of course going to the Bishops school which had its own Rhodes Scholarship, I knew about that through my school. And of course, you know, the scholarships that the four schools have enjoyed had been controversial, rightly so in my opinion for many years. I think the first time that I remember the four schools scholarships being seriously questioned was possibly in the 1970s. My father was on the council, he was the longest serving member of the council, or the board of trustees of Bishops at that time. And being a lawyer he was asked to give an opinion, which he did. He was in favour of the scholarships being kept by the four schools and even at that early stage in my life I was very much against that.
INT: Oh interesting.
RES: And we had some quite intense discussions about that.
INT: Did you, you know, at that point-
RES: But I am of course, I am a beneficiary, you know, I’m aware of that. So I have a complex relationship with the Rhodes Scholarships both through my family’s connection to Rhodes and through my school’s connection to the four schools scholarships.
INT: And did your, you know, at that point in your education did you potentially see the Rhodes Scholarship as something that you would pursue yourself? Or did that come-
RES: Mmm.
INT: You did. Okay.
RES: I did. Yeah. I did from fairly early on.
INT: Oh really? Okay. Okay. And, and you mentioned studying English literature and philosophy at the University of Cape Town. What else defined your time at the University of Cape Town?
RES: It was a wild time. Early 1970s, I had very long hair. I was very influenced by US and UK music and hippy culture. Coming out of a very structured and I would say conservative high school experience, I just let rip. I didn’t do anything like the amount of academic work that I should have done. I benefitted from all kinds of other things. I had a very close friend, dear friend who was a, became quite an eminent musician in the UK, he was British. And we, he was studying music and we used to spend most of our afternoons in the music school library listening to vinyl records.
INT: Oh wow.
RES: He introduced me to Western classical music and we just listened again and again and again to pieces that he was studying. He subsequently went on and did a doctorate in music at Oxford after I was in Oxford in the 1980s.
INT: Oh wow. Wow.
RES: So it was a time of great experimentation and thinking about other things than straightforward academics. I did not do as well at UCT as I should have. And I remember when I was interviewed by the Rhodes Scholarship committee, I remember very well saying to them, “My school record at Bishops is outstanding. You know that, you can see that. My University of Cape Town record is not as good as it should be. But if you give me the Rhodes Scholarship I guarantee you I will get a First pass, First Class pass in English literature.” Which I did.
INT: Oh wow!
RES: So I think they took a bet on me.
INT: Yeah.
RES: Which I felt, you know, honour bound to deliver.
INT: And you know I’m cur- This, this varies in each constituency with regards to the way in which scholars learn that they were selected for the Rhodes Scholarship. And I was wondering if you would mind reflecting on the moment of learning that you had been selected for the Rhodes Scholarship.
RES: I was surprised and really overwhelmed partly because the other finalist who was one year below me at school whom I knew very well was in many ways in my opinion better qualified. So I felt a little bit compromised. And that added to the feeling of being overwhelmed.
INT: And is it-
RES: But I had, just to fill in, I finished at UCT in November 1975. This is a bit of a detour but it’ll come back to the main strand. And South Africa had invaded Angola in June, July of that year. And they were aided and abetted by the CIA in the United States. It was one of those proxy wars, cold wars where Cuba was supporting the Angolan Government and Cuba was aided by Russia. And South African invaded from the south. The South African attempt was to overthrow Agostinho Neto who was the first democratically elected President of Angola, who was also a very well-known published poet. And I thought I was going to be drafted to fight in that war. So having had plans to carry straight on with a so-called honours degree and a Master’s degree at the University of Cape Town, or possibly Rhodes University, I decided in January of 1976 to leave quickly. And I did. And I jumped on a ship from Cape Town to Barcelona. And I spent time in Barcelona. I hitchhiked to Switzerland, hitchhiked to Paris, lived on a barge with some South African friends on the Seine for three months and worked in a restaurant. Went to visit some friends in Oxford and actually had an interview pre the Rhodes award with the Deans of Admission, people controlling admissions in another college other than Oriel. They expressed interest in taking me, when I came back to South Africa in July of that year, 1976 when the Angolan crisis had somewhat faded, that’s when I applied for the Rhodes Scholarship.
INT: Oh wow.
RES: So 1976 was a very interesting, I wouldn’t say broken year at all, but it was a year of doing a whole lot of different things.
INT: Yeah. And-
RES: On the run for part of it and then back in South Africa.
INT: And had that been, that time spent in Oxford in 1976 was that your first experience in Oxford or had you-
RES: No that was my first time. Yeah.
INT: Your first time at Oxford, okay.
RES: I’d been to the UK before but not to Oxford, yeah.
INT: Okay. And did the, you mentioned that growing up that there was a part of you even at that time that envisioned potentially pursuing a Rhodes Scholarship. Did being in Oxford solidify that for you in any way?
RES: Totally. Totally. Yeah.
INT: It did.
RES: It made me very determined to come back and apply for the scholarship. Which I did and so I must have been informed that I had the scholarship somewhere around about October of 1976 for the following year. So I went back to the University of Cape Town in January, February of ’77 and registered for the one year honours degree in English. So the typical structure then was a three year general BA and then you did a one year honours in your particular specialty. And then you could do a Master’s after that.
INT: Okay.
RES: So I started the honours degree in English literature. Everyone knew that I wasn’t going to complete it because I was going to go to Oxford in the middle of the year. That’s when I worked very closely with John Coetzee. And others but he was somebody who had quite a significant influence on my thinking.
INT: And how so? Would you mind expanding on that a little bit?
RES: He, he just loved being eccentric. And he had such a wide range of interests. They were not incompatible at all but you would never think of that number of different things going together in one person. And I found that very intriguing. And it sort of in a way gave me permission as somebody who was, how old was I then, 22, gave me permission to indulge in my own eccentricities.
INT: And what were those for you at that time?
RES: Perhaps it’s better not to go there.
INT: Okay.
RES: But in terms of, in terms of thinking and reading, you know, authors that were unusual at that time. He introduced me to people like Patrick White in Australia for example.
[00:20:13]
INT: And, and so the fall of 1977 comes and or September, October 1977, how do you make your way to Oxford? Did you fly? Did you get there another way?
RES: We, the South Africans then made their own way.
INT: Oh okay.
RES: I don’t know what it’s like now. I took a ship, the second time and I have never done it since then. The second time I have been on a big cruise liner if you like. So the first time was going to Barcelona and that was on an Italian boat, a Lloyd Triestino called the Achille Lauro which became famous about seven or eight years later when it was hijacked in the Mediterranean. And then I went to, I went from Cape Town to Southampton when I went to Oxford on a Cunard liner boat. And I rented a car which turned out to be a Land Rover, it seemed very safari like. And I drove to Oxford from Southampton in this rented Land Rover.
INT: Oh wow. Wow.
RES: With all my stuff. And I can remember the porter at the gate of Oriel being very surprised and rather impressed that this young South African drove up in a Land Rover.
INT: And how long, how long was that trip by boat from- That’s a-
RES: Seven or eight days. Yeah.
INT: Seven or eight, okay. And so there weren’t any other scholars elected from-
RES: No, I was on my own.
INT: Wow. And what attracted you to Oriel College?
RES: I applied to three colleges, Oriel was one of them. I liked the size and I liked the location. And there were some people there including Glenn Black who was a South African and a Rhodes Scholar himself that I was keen to study with. He was one of the English dons in Oxford, in Oriel at the time.
INT: And you were sharing before we, earlier in our conversation that you pursued a second BA in Oxford. And I’m curious how, if you would mind reflecting on that experience perhaps with the lens of you know how the Oxford educational experience may have differed to what you experienced previously.
RES: Yeah. Well the obvious thing as an undergraduate, repeat undergraduate, was the studying with just one person. And writing essays sometimes twice a week and taking them to a person and sitting in his or her office or rooms and reading them and talking about them. It was completely novel to me. And I know the trend since then has been away from the second BA much towards M degrees and DPhils. And that’s understandable and it’s probably overall a good thing. But one of the quintessential parts of the Oxford experience and Cambridge is the tutorial. You know one on one or two, two on one. And I loved that. I loved it. And one of my very good friends in Oriel was an American Rhodes Scholar also doing a second BA in English literature called Hoke Perkins, Hoke Perkins III. And so he and I used to share tutorials sometimes.
INT: Yeah interesting.
RES: And that was a very, very unusual, novel challenging experience writing and reading and talking with just one very erudite person.
INT: And we will talk quite a bit about your own career in education but I’m curious if at any point up to this experience in Oxford if, if being a lifelong educator is something that had occurred to yet, or if that came later.
RES: It came later. Definitely.
INT: Okay.
RES: I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had a growing list of things that I didn’t want to do. Having toyed with the idea of law I decided against it. Partly out of a sense of, you know, I don’t want to go where my dad went. At that time representatives of some of the big national and multinational South African companies like Anglo-American and De Beers would come to Oxford and interview South African Rhodes Scholars and try and sign them up. And I knew that I didn’t want to do that. And then having South African passports at that stage, given everything that was going on with Apartheid, it was very difficult to stay on in England after finishing. So Judith and I got married while I was a Rhodes Scholar. She came and joined me towards the end of my first year. We decided to go back to South Africa. She had decided she wanted to major in ceramics having studied painting in South Africa. The only university at that time in South Africa that took ceramics seriously in the fine art programme was the University of Natal as it was then called in Pietermaritzburg. So she, she sort of led me to Pietermaritzburg. And I applied for job in the English department there and got it. And so I became and English teacher at the university level, English lecturer. Which I did for a few years and then I became interested through a growing involvement in politics, I became interested more in teaching language at that stage. So I shifted from the English literature department to the education department and organised language programmes for black Zulu speaking school teachers and heads of school. And that’s when I applied to go back to the UK. So having done two years in Oriel and come away with the BA Honours in English, four years later I got a third year, I was awarded a third year of the Rhodes Scholarship. And I wrote to the Trust saying this is what I want to do. Can I come and do a one year M in Oxford in applied linguistics and second language teaching? And they wrote back, I was really surprised because I thought that they were very conservative, they wrote back and said, “You’re very welcome to have the third year of the scholarship. But we suggest you go to the University of Lancaster” which was much more progressive in that particular field at that time. It was the leader in the UK. So I had a third year of the scholarship at Lancaster University. And I did a one year Master’s degree, it was called Linguistics for English Language Teaching. And studied with some remarkable people both in my cohort of students but also the professors were wonderful. And that was when Maggie Thatcher was Prime Minister in the UK.
INT: Oh okay.
RES: And Arthur Scargill the representative of the Miners’ Union, they were in big fights with each other and the organisations they represented. So living in Lancaster at that time, it was mid-1984 to ’85, was fascinating. Very charged.
INT: Yeah. I would have to imagine so. I’m curious Malcolm if we could go back just a moment to your first two years in Oxford because I’m conscious that yours was the first class that included Rhodes women. And I’m curious about the way in which that was a sense of the class dynamics.
RES: What I don’t know is how many women were in that cohort, that first one. I mentioned Sheila Niven to you earlier. She was, she became a good friend. She was from South Africa. It just seemed totally natural to me. Weird that it hadn’t happened before that. Were those female Rhodes students, Rhodes Scholars particularly aware of the fact that they were the first at the time? Maybe. But it didn’t seem to emerge as anything distinctive.
INT: And was your, you know I’m conscious that the role of Rhodes House, the role that Rhodes House plays now in the scholar experience is different. And so was curious about what role your class played in your experience in Oxford. And what role Rhodes House, if any, played in your experience in Oxford.
[00:30:06]
RES: Rhodes House was much further away it seemed to me than it seems now. Much further from the scholars’ experience. And so when I look back, in a sense that was freeing in some ways. But some of the things that the scholars seem to get today through a much greater connectedness to Rhodes House and everything it offers, not least of which is the leadership training which sounds fascinating to me, those things looking back on my experience I think I missed out on. And I’m very impressed that those things have developed now. But I was always aware of Rhodes House and the Trust and the Warden being there and being a support as and when needed. But again it was also a time when I was very self-conscious about being a white South African. And so meetings with other Rhodes Scholars from other countries could be fraught. And I remember one person, African-American, who has remained a friend and is a very eminent legal scholar himself, when he first met me he was very aggressive towards me for a while and then we managed to work through that.
INT: And did- Did a lot of the interaction with your Rhodes classmates I imagine were informal, just having, yeah-
RES: Yeah very informal. And I can’t remember too many whole cohort events. There were a few dinners at Rhodes House when we were all invited and most of us attended. But they were few and far between then. I think those kinds of attempts to get the group together were very different at that time from now.
INT: And did you have the opportunity to travel while in Oxford?
RES: Yes I did, we did, we being Judith and I because we married in the summer of the end of my first year. So she was with me for a few months before that and all the way through the second year. We travelled quite extensively. Including hitchhiking, it’s so interesting when you talk about hitchhiking. When I talk about hitchhiking nowadays with students in the schools where I have worked, they were just amazed. Some of them don’t even know what it is. But I used to hitchhike all around Southern Africa. We got married in Oxford in July 1978 and we hitchhiked from Oxford to Greece and back.
INT: Wow.
RES: Through France and Italy. And that just seemed perfectly normal to us.
INT: And yeah I’m curious, I imagine you mentioned your first year of being, arriving at Oxford and driving yourself to Oxford in the Land Rover and living at Oriel College. And then I imagine that that second year with Judith you probably lived outside of college.
RES: We did. We lived in Summertown House, up the Banbury Road, yeah.
INT: Okay. And how did those, did those two experiences- Did they feel quite different in terms of ways of experiencing Oxford?
RES: Yeah they were. But the essential experience was unchanged for me and the essential experience of Oxford for me was being aware that I was surrounded by incredibly brilliant people. The undergraduate students, and remember I was a few years older than them, they just seemed to me to be so sharp and so interested in what they were reading and studying and talking about. That was the most indelible I think part of my Oxford experience. And that’s true of any really selective, really competitive entry at university anywhere in the world I think. It’s the students that keep you on your toes and interacting with some of those people was just amazing to me.
INT: And when you, when you came back for your Master’s degree, I imagine at that time to some extent had next steps solidified in your mind with regards to potential career trajectory.
RES: Yes and no. I think I knew then that I was going to stay in education at some level. Before I went to Lancaster to do the English Language teaching, the Master’s degree, I’d shifted to the education department in Pietermaritzburg. And I was working on designing courses for the school teachers and heads of school who were coming in from different parts of the countryside. And I promised the education department in Pietermaritzburg that once I had finished the Master’s degree, I’d come back and develop a course which I felt more confident about. And I did that. So I spent only one year back in Pietermaritzburg in 1986 because before coming back we had decided we were going to leave. It just felt too dangerous. And you know I knew people who had been killed for their political involvement. So we decided to leave and a neighbourhood, well a neighbour, old, old childhood friend from growing up in Cape Town, he had moved to Botswana and he was teaching in this school called Maru-a-Pula. And he persuaded us to go and join him. So after one year back in Pietermaritzburg in 1986 we moved to Botswana and I went to the school as the head of the English department and Judith came as the head of the art department.
INT: What years is that?
RES: So that was 1987.
INT: Oh I apologise, what age were those students?
RES: In the school?
INT: Yeah.
RES: Ah, it was a British, modelled on a British middle and high school. So age 12 to 18.
INT: Okay.
RES: Yeah, ending with British A level exams and qualifications.
INT: Okay. And you mentioned you were head of the English department and Judith was head of the art department.
RES: Fine, yeah.
INT: Okay. And-
RES: But I can remember just to butt in-
INT: Yeah please.
RES: I can remember when I left my university colleagues in Pietermaritzburg said to me pretty much using these words, “Why are you going to teach in a school? You’re going down in the world.” And I remember saying to them at that time quite clearly, “I’m not actually going down in the world. The work of school teachers is much more important than the work we’re doing here.” And I said, “If I keep on working long enough in schools, I might in the end move up to an elementary school.” Which I did because when I went to Beijing the school there was K through 12. And in last year in Lagos the American International School of Lagos has a pre-, early childhood programmes and they start at age three which is fascinating.
INT: Oh wow. Wow. And how-
RES: But in 1987, it was clear- It was clear that things were changing politically. Nobody knew, at least I didn’t know how long it was going to take and how violent or non-violent it would be. I mean in the end it was quite quick, 1994 came quite quickly thanks to people like Mandela and many others it was considerably less violent than it could have been. And so we were invited- I was invited to go back to South Africa to some quite interesting jobs in education. But by that stage we’d fallen in love in Botswana and fallen in love with that school. And I was head of the school by then, so we never went back. And I haven’t lived or worked in South Africa since then. But I go back regularly to see family and friends.
INT: And did you mention before we started recording that your oldest child was born in Botswana?
RES: Both our kids were born-
INT: Both were born in Botswana.
RES: They were actually born in South Africa but while we were living in Botswana.
INT: Okay.
RES: So they identify most easily with Botswana as their root, taproot.
INT: And did that experience of teaching and then being head of school in Botswana did that solidify for you that you anticipated spending your career in the kind of either secondary or primary school level?
RES: Yeah. Yeah definitely. So I think I fell into education by chance. And then into school level education, high school, middle school and finally elementary school almost by default. But it’s worked for me and I can’t think of anything better to do. I love it.
[00:40:00]
INT: Yeah. What is it that you love about it?
RES: I love the interaction with the kids and the feeling that you actually have some impact on them and their lives. And something that most of them don’t realise, some do and some will talk about it, is that they have an impact on me. Huge.
INT: Yeah. And the, you know, I imagine too the impact that you have on children and they have on you at the educator level but also, you know, I’m just thinking about your impact as head of school on educators. And I imagine vice versa similarly, the impact that other educators have on you.
RES: Yeah of course.
INT: Yeah. What, what inspired you to want to transition into a teaching or head of department role to school leadership?
RES: It just happened naturally. I, I’d been in leadership positions throughout my own school career. I was what was called head boy or senior prefect at Bishops, equivalent of, you know, being the President of the student council, that sort of thing. And it just seemed to run naturally. I don’t think I’m particularly extroverted but I can pretend to be. I learnt that one. But my father always used to say that he couldn’t abide being told what to do by anyone else which is partly why he became an advocate in his own practice. And that always made sense to me. I think as a leader I’m very consultatative and hands-off. I don’t think I get in people’s way. But I far prefer to be the person who has to make the decisions when they need to be made.
INT: You prefer to be the person who makes those decisions?
RES: I prefer to be that person, yeah.
INT: Yeah. Yeah. And how-
RES: But I have been a school leader, I’ve been a head of school for a long time, longer than most because I became head of Maru-a-Pula in 1991.
INT: Wow. Wow.
RES: And so, you know, I’ve had over 30 years as a head of school.
INT: Wow. That is incredible.
RES: Yeah. In different schools in different countries.
INT: Yes. At different levels of education too.
RES: Yeah, yeah.
INT: That is incredible. And how long was your family in Botswana?
RES: We left in 1999. So 12 years.
INT: Okay. And what, what inspired that, that move?
RES: I’d begun to work more and more with international groups. I helped set up a consortium of schools called Global Connections which was American-based and started here. But the founder was a friend and I’d helped him get it going. I was on the board of a group of schools called the Round Square, which now numbers about just under 300 schools around the world, then it was about 100. And they were- They are all schools that are dedicated to the educational philosophies and thinking of a man called Kurt Hahn, German. Kurt Hahn was one of the giants of educational thinking in the twentieth century. Helped start the United World Colleges. Started the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme. Started Outward Bound.
INT: Oh wow.
RES: The Round Square was dedicated to him. So I was thinking more and more internationally and just decided that it was time to move. And then came to Massachusetts for one year but I had already been appointed to be the head of Atlantic College in Wales, the founding United World College. So I had one year in Deerfield as a visiting scholar. The head at the time, Eric Widmer was a very close friend of mine. And he invited me to come there for a year. So I taught courses in South African and African literature and leadership and organised a very big conference on environmental teaching at the end of that year in the summer just before I went to Wales.
INT: And were those two pieces kind of the, you mentioned the environmental piece and the kind of global nature of education, were those two things that you feel have kind of always been fundamental to your philosophy of education?
RES: Yeah. Most definitely.
INT: Okay. Yeah. Would you mind expanding on that a little bit about what is the importance of those two facets within primary and secondary education?
RES: If we think about the way in which humans have divided the world into more or less 200 countries all with their own nationalistic programmes, it’s crazy. It’s a recipe for some of the worst things that humans are capable of. So education which tries to move beyond that by deliberately focusing on diversity, celebrating difference, just seems like such a natural obvious thing to do. And of course there are different types of international programmes in schools and different types of international school. But growing up as I did in South Africa where as a white South African under Apartheid I became aware quite early in my childhood that I wasn’t part of that community that I was born into. And I didn’t want to be identified with that community, just opened me up very early on to all kinds of other possibilities in global thinking and trying to bring those into education. And then with regard to the environment, you know, I’ve thought about this a lot and I have written about it a little, there’s a huge passion that South Africans had for the landscape and for the land, which isn’t to say that other groups in other parts of the world don’t share that for their own landscapes and contexts. But I think if you are a dispossessed South African the fact that the land was taken away from you and it’s such beautiful land means that you identify with it even more strongly. And if you are let’s say a white South African like me who is part of that colonial legacy whether I like it or not, somehow identifying with the beauty of the land is almost an escape from guilt. I don’t know, that’s, it’s very complex and I haven’t articulated that very well. But very strong identification with and love of the remarkable natural heritage of South Africa was deeply ingrained in me early on. And that finds an expression in ecological interests and bringing that into education. And Cape Town is such an interesting city. It’s brutally divided still even, you know, 30 years after Apartheid. And there is tremendous crime and poverty in some parts of it. Have you been there?
INT: I have not, no.
RES: And you’re very aware of it as you fly in because the airport is in an area where there are lots of poor people. But the area around the mountain and the sea is staggeringly beautiful. And I grew up there, you know. At my school every day I was in the shadow of the mountain and looked at it.
INT: Yeah. And you know you mentioned your, your father’s career in law and deciding not to go in that direction. And your mum’s career as a nurse. And was curious, you know, what your family’s reflections on you going into education were.
RES: I think my parents were very alarmed at the son that I had become apparently when I was at the University of Cape Town. And then when I went to Oxford and came back and got involved in education they were very relieved.
INT: And how long did you spend as the Principal of Atlantic College in Wales?
RES: Atlantic College was seven years.
INT: Seven years, okay.
RES: So my headships were eight years in Botswana, although 12 years in the school, I was promoted from within. Eight years as head of Maru-a-Pula. Seven years at Atlantic College. Six years at Hotchkiss. Nine years in Beijing.
INT: Wow. Wow. And what- Would you mind sharing a little bit then about what brought you to Hotchkiss? So Hotchkiss was following Atlantic College.
RES: Mmm.
INT: Yeah, what brought to here?
RES: You know I’d become familiar with the East Coast boarding school world partly through spending a year at Deerfield, partly through other connections.
[00:50:01]
I mentioned the Round Square earlier. Hotchkiss was keen, I helped Deerfield join the Round Square. Hotchkiss was keen on joining. The head at that time, Skip Mattoon, who lives just down the road, in his eighties now, he was a friend and he invited me to come to visit Hotchkiss to talk to the faculty about joining the Round Square. This must have been in 2004 or ‘5, which I did. And I could see that some of their growing interests as a school meshed with mine. The President of the Board at that time was very senior in Goldman Sachs, a man called John Thornton, he was very interested in environmental and international type emphases in the curriculum and the students’ experience at Hotchkiss. So through those kinds of connections I became interested in the school and applied when the job became vacant. And moved here in 2007. Our son had just graduated from Atlantic College and our daughter came with us into grade 10 at Hotchkiss.
INT: Okay. And, and is Hotchkiss an international school?
RES: As much as any American school can be. International enrolment now is about 17%. When I was there it was about 14, 15%. But we had significant financial aid for international students as well as national students at that time. So we were very fortunate in being able to bring in all kinds of students from outside the United States who wouldn’t have been able to afford a Hotchkiss education or even dream of it. And that was, you know, a clear mandate given to me by the board of the time. I could rely on my United World College experience and contacts in Atlantic College to help develop that. And one student I remember very well, I’m still in touch with him, remarkable young man, he’s now in his thirties. He came to Hotchkiss as a one year senior and I think I’m going to say a little bit about him because who knows what it might lead to. Jeff Brenzel was the Dean of Admission at Yale at that time and I got to know him reasonably well. He called me one day and he said, “We’ve just had this application from Paul Loren, South Sudanese, currently in Johannesburg who wants to come to Yale and I want to take him but he needs a year in an American high school to acclimate before he comes to Yale. Will you take him?” So of course I said “Yes we’ll take him.” So Paul came to us. His story in a nutshell is born in Sudan before South Sudan became an independent country. Strife, war, tension, his parents took him across the border into Northern Kenya when he was three or four and dropped him and left him in a refugee camp around Lake Turkana. And you can imagine what the schools were like in a refugee camp, pretty much non-existent. But he was very scholastic and studied and worked and won a scholarship to the Alliance Academy in Nairobi which is one of the best known schools in Nairobi. From there he went to the African Leadership Academy which was started by some friends of mine, contacts of mine. And he did two years there and he wanted to go to Yale. And he came to Hotchkiss for a year and then he went to Yale. He moved back to Kenya, he was in the first cohort or second cohort of the Schwarzman Scholars to Tsinghua University and of course he was, he spent his year at Tsinghua when I was in Beijing.
INT: Oh wow.
RES: So he came to my school a few times and spoke to the students. And what does he do now? He’s not on Wall Street and he’s not making a lot of money in Nairobi. He’s actually started a school in South Sudan called Kinyeti Academy. Kinyeti is the highest mountain in South Sudan. And that’s what Paul’s doing. So it’s a bit of a detour but you know I have been so fortunate in my career to have met people like him, students like him who have gone on to do unbelievable things. Much, much more so than anything I’ve ever done. His name, Paul is an English name, his South Sudanese name is Lorem Aminathia.
INT: That’s so beautiful.
RES: It’s amazing.
INT: That is really, really beautiful. Wow. And so he was a student of yours at Hotchkiss.
RES: One year at Hotchkiss yeah.
INT: One year at Hotchkiss, okay.
RES: But I have stayed in touch with people like him, you know, many, many people who have been students in schools where I have worked. They write to me, I write back to them.
INT: I’m curious about, you know, before we transition into your time in Beijing I was wondering if you would mind reflecting a little bit on the- You mentioned 30 years serving as a head of school.
RES: It’s a long time.
INT: And I, I’m just conscious of the incredible changes in education that you must have seen and the impact of the internet for example and AI. And was wondering if you would mind reflecting on that a little bit.
RES: Mmm. Well there have been enormous changes in curriculum and pedagogy and learning style. The AI revolution is still in its early stages although it’s moving very, very fast. And it’s having all kinds of positive and perhaps negative impacts. But some of the things that I feel strongly about are more emotional. You know for good reason, very good reason schools around the world, national schools and international schools have become very focused in the last let’s say two decades on child protection and safeguarding, for good reason because there have been horrible abuses by predatory teachers and others in our schools. But the detriment to that is that we’ve lost sight of caregiving, what I call caregiving. You know we’re so focused on safeguarding that we don’t know how to give care anymore in ways that are meaningful. And children need care in schools particularly children who come from families that don’t offer it. And teachers are now frightened of that because caregiving can so easily be interpreted as something negative and something moving in the abusive direction. That’s been a huge change and it’s a sad one for me. The safeguarding is really important but the caregiving is equally important. And teachers in my experience in schools where I worked 20, 30 years ago didn’t feel as if they were sticking their necks out by speaking of love. Love for students. Whereas now it’s very hard to do that without being misinterpreted. So that’s been a big shift. Another big one is we can’t take the risks, legitimate and challenging risks that lead to real transformation and growth in the way that we used to. You know Atlantic College to give a very good example. Kurt Hahn was one of the founders of that school. He was very focused on what he called rescue services. And in his school in Germany, the first school that he started, Salem School in 1922, the students ran the local fire service. And they still do it. And at Atlantic College which is in a very tricky section of the Bristol Channel between Cardiff and Swansea, the student used to run three services. The coast guard service, sea rescue, and the first generation of students actually built their own boats, the solid hull inflatable boat which is now used all over the world was developed at Atlantic College in the 1960s. Rigid hull inflatable. So students ran the rescue, the sea rescue service, they ran the cliff rescue service, and the lifeboat service. And those things have been severely undermined and eroded and in some cases stopped by the British Health & Safety Commission. Was there ever an accident? Not that I know of, not a serious one. Were there lives saved by those services where people were at risk of drowning in the sea? Yes, again and again. When I was at Maru-a-Pula in Botswana I started a bush campus as I called it in a very wild part of Botswana. Students went there, lived in tents, did a one week course in environmental education. We were right on the banks of the Limpopo river, huge crocodile colonies and hippo colonies in the river, elephants that would walk through the camp. Can you do that now?
[01:00:01]
Well we’re trying to revive it but it fell away after I left because people were frightened. And parents were frightened. But we see it in our towns too. You know, kids don’t run around in the way they used to outdoors. So that’s been a big shift. The whole experiential education thrust outdoor ed. is growing in some ways as a necessary corrective to spending too much on your phone and other devices. But you have to be so careful and you can’t take the risks that we used to take. Not that we were taking risks for the sake of taking risks, that’s just part of the endeavour. If you, if you’re outdoors, particularly in wild places, then you have to accept that. So that’s another change which concerns me.
INT: Yeah. That’s, thank you so much for sharing that. And I’m curious if you’ve, you know, conscious that the global nature of your work, if you’ve recognised trends that, about if there is particular geographies where that’s being felt particularly deeply, that kind of hesitancy around risk?
RES: More in the developed world countries so-called than in the others.
INT: Yeah. Really fascinating.
RES: But I took students from Lagos last year, almost exactly a year ago in May, I took a group of 11 or 12 grade 9 and 10 students to Botswana and we were most of the time in the north of Botswana in very wild country, with experienced guides. And I know a reasonable amount about how to behave when you are surrounded by wild animals. Was it risky? Maybe a little bit. Was it a remarkable experience for those kids? Totally transformative, yeah.
INT: Wow. And so your, while at Hotchkiss my understanding is that another opportunity presented itself to you in Beijing. I was wondering if you would mind sharing about what brought you there.
RES: I was leaving Hotchkiss. I was looking around. I knew that I wanted to be part of a new school. I was talking to people who were starting schools in Japan, China, Mozambique, Germany, Armenia. And in the end I decided to go for Beijing for many reasons. One is that the geopolitics of the relationship between America and China was then and still is in my opinion the most important one in the world. So I wanted to understand that a bit more and be part of a small drop in that ocean. I was fascinated- I had become fascinated by China. I think I first went to Beijing in 2000, so maybe 11 or 12 years before I went to start that school. The freedom to do what I thought we needed to do was wide open in a way that wouldn’t be the case now because things in China have changed to some extent. But the Chinese principals, the founding trustees, one of whom is the son of Wen Jiabao who was Prime Minister in China from about 2000 to 2010. They had studied in the United States and they had a sense of some of the strengths of American high school and college education. And they wanted to, to put it crudely, they wanted to lift a Hotchkiss or a Deerfield and drop it in Beijing. And when they came to me I said, “That’s not what we should be doing. In my view, if you want me to be the founding head then I am interested in taking the best of three traditions of learning. The deepest and the longest by far being the Chinese.” So I said, “Let’s see if we can start an experimental school which blends the best of the East, in this case China, with the best of the West, which is in this case mainly America, and the international tradition and bring those three together and see what we can do.” And it was just fascinating. It was the most remarkable, magical experience.
INT: Wow. And was that, and is that, that kind of philosophy and that integration of, as you said best of education in the East, best of education in the West, and the international component, is that relatively rare in the educational world?
RES: We were groundbreaking. Nobody had thought about it. I wrote a lot about it. It’s very simple when you think about it. At least it’s simple to me. Most of the schools in the world are national schools, public schools mainly, some independent schools. And they’re national schools in the sense that they are deeply rooted in their home country. And they tend to follow the curriculum of the national Department of Education whatever that might be. They tend to be very nationalistic, overtly patriotic in the way they present their histories, things like that. So you’ve got 90% let’s say of the world’s schools are national, maybe 10%, it’s not even 10%, at the other end of that spectrum are international. International schools tend to have very shallow roots in the host country. You know they follow international curricula, in some cases they’re not even allowed to have host country citizens in their schools. So you’ve got those two ends of the spectrum. And we said, “Let’s try and create a different kind of school,” which we called a world school. So one of Keystone Academy’s straplines is: “a new world school, a new model of education in China.” And again what we thought we wanted to do there was to focus in a very intent way on what we call the Chinese thread through the curriculum, classroom and outside the classroom. And what we meant by the Chinese thread was focusing on Chinese history and language, identity, culture as much as we could but all the time trying to open that up through a world view or a world lens. So everything was connected from China to the world. Bilingual school, Chinese and English. And there’s a very narrow view of Chinese education, in some cases Eastern education in the West. We tend to think of it as rote learning, memory. But those things have a part to play in learning. And you can’t learn a language like Chinese, you have to be, you have to know 3,000 or more characters to be functionally literate, you can’t learn Chinese in a written form unless you use your memory at a very intent way, intense way. And it’s so different from generating all our English words from 26 letters. So just bringing those two languages together brought together two very different ways of learning.
INT: That’s really fascinating.
RES: It’s totally fascinating.
INT: And is Keystone, what grades is Keystone? You mentioned kind of-
RES: K through 12. Yeah.
INT: Okay. K through 12, okay. And what was that experience be like, was, because I imagine Keystone was your first experience in a K through 12?
RES: It was.
INT: And curious about the experience of seeing students really through that whole educational journey, yeah.
RES: Oh it was marvellous, absolutely fantastic. Yeah I, it’s a funny story. Some time before I went to China I threw away all my neck ties except for about 10 that had African animals on them. And I used to stand at the gate of Keystone every morning with one of- I was there every morning but other school leaders were there on a rotation. And the young kids would come in and they’d give me the Chinese name for the animal that I was wearing. So although my Chinese is very weak, I have quite a good vocabulary in African animals’ names in Chinese.
INT: Oh that’s really wonderful.
RES: But I loved working with the kids at that age. So interesting. And the school is now 12 years old. So in the graduation that’s just happened, 21 families of the graduating cohort of I guess about 120 students, 21 started in grade 1.
INT: Oh well that’s amazing.
RES: And they had a special event, a special dinner on the campus just for that group the night before graduation. And I was asked to talk online which I did at the end of that.
[01:10:03]
INT: Oh beautiful. Wow. What a milestone to reach that landmark in the life of the school. It’s incredible.
RES: And it’s a huge vote of faith from parents to send your kids to a brand new school in its first year.
INT: Yeah. And is, is Keystone, you mentioned that some international schools, that they differ in their philosophy around having, having students from the local. Does Keystone have Chinese students as well?
RES: Keystone is mainly Chinese, yeah.
INT: Mainly Chinese, okay.
RES: The intent is to have more non-Chinese than we’ve succeeded thus far in attracting. So it’s a small number of non-Chinese students.
INT: Okay. Such a fascinating model to bring those three pieces together.
RES: But it’s only 12 years old, you know. And I said right from the beginning, I said there’s certain obvious milestones that we can chart in the growth of our school. And one of them which we haven’t reached yet and it might quite a few more years to come, is when, you know, to come back to the East Coast of the United States, when a typical applicant let’s say from the Upper East Side of New York applies to Hotchkiss, Deerfield, Andover and Keystone and gets accepted by all and ops to choose Keystone. And if you think about the number of Chinese students since the opening of the country under Deng Xiaoping, think about the number of Chinese students who have come to study in the United States at the high school level and at the college level. Hundreds of thousands. And think about the miniscule amount of Americans who have done the same in reverse to go to China. If the same number of Americans or even half the number of Americans as Chinese have come there had gone there, the understandings between those two countries would be much better than they are.
INT: And what is-
RES: So I would encourage Americans to go to China to study.
INT: Yeah.
RES: And there are, you know, there are great schools in China. Keystone is one them and they are great universities.
INT: And have you seen any increasing trend towards that in your career, no.
RES: Sadly not. You know there’s small programmes, the Schwarzman Scholars being one like that which are having a very small impact. One of my dreams, but I don’t think I’ll do it, is to start a four year boarding high school in the countryside in China with the explicit intention of being, you know, a significant mix of Chinese and non-Chinese, probably only about 30 or 40% Chinese. More than half would be non-Chinese.
INT: Okay. Wow. And is that, you mentioned a boarding school specifically, is- That’s something we didn’t talk about in terms of we talked a little bit about the, you know, your experience at different grade levels and leadership of institutions at different grade levels. But would you mind sharing a little bit about the role of boarding in education.
RES: You know it’s so strange that I’ve been in boarding schools all my working life as a head. When I went to Bishops, and we go back to Bishops and the Diocesan College, Rhodes Scholarship etc., I lived on the perimeter fence of the school.
INT: Oh wow.
RES: I could jump over the fence and get to school. I was a day student. At that time I think Bishops was probably about, I’m guessing two thirds boarding and one third day, something like that. And I could not imagine being a boarder. I thought it was the most terrible thing in the world to think of being a boarding student. And yet I have ended up in boarding schools as an adult, it’s weird. Bishops is a church school. So we had chapel every morning. And the first chapel bells would ring at 8.20. And that was a sign for people to line up by house outside different entry points to the chapel, different doorways. And then the second bell would go at 8.25 at which point you filed in for about a 15 minute chapel service. And I could get out of my bed at home, I could hear the chapel bells, I used to get out at 8.20 and pull on my clothes, no breakfast, run across the field, jump the fence, run across the field, and I’d be in the chapel at 8.25. But then I ended up in boarding schools and, you know, it’s strange, I have lived on boarding campuses all my working life in schools until I went to Lagos last year for that one year. That’s a day school. But all the faculty, or most of the faculty live on campus because it’s just easier given the nature of the city. So in one corner of the campus there are four interlocking apartment blocks. So again although I was in a day school I was living on campus.
INT: And did your, having those experiences did your perception of boarding shift just with regards to the role that boarding can play in the-
RES: Oh yeah, definitely, definitely. And it’s such a different experience particularly if you’re in a boarding school in a country area like Hotchkiss where you can’t get into the amenities that a city offers. I mean Keystone is in Beijing so that’s different. And quite a few of the- Most of the boarding students at Keystone would go home for weekends, or part of the weekend. But we mandated boarding at Keystone from grades 9 through 12.
INT: Okay. And where did your career bring you after Keystone?
RES: After Keystone, 2022, I guess we have to start talking about something we haven’t mentioned so far and that’s Covid. Everyone has their own Covid stories.
INT: Yes. But I mean a unique impact on education.
RES: Yeah. I was back here in the Northwest corner of Connecticut in January of 2020. And it was a school holiday for the Chinese New Year. And I think everyone was expected to come back roundabout February, 10th, something like that. One of the Keystone trustees lives in Wuhan and through most of January while I was here she was talking to me about what was going on and how this at that stage unknown illness was spreading. And towards the end of that month I just said to Francis, “Look I’m coming back. I’m going to cut my holiday and come back.” And I remember my daughter saying to me, “Dad are you doing a wise thing?” And I said, “I have no idea. Time will tell.” But I got on a plane out of New Jersey. There were three other people on the plane, this must have been January, 28th or 29th 2020. They were Chinese. Almost totally empty plane. Arrived at Beijing Capital Airport, almost totally empty airport. And from that moment I didn’t leave China until July 2022. And I left Beijing twice to go elsewhere in China. So it was two and a half years there through Covid. I mean I had already told the board before that that I was going to leave after nine years. So that wasn’t a surprise. But then I came back here thinking that I would do different things. Got back to Connecticut in July, August ’22 and almost immediately I was called and asked if I would take on an interim position in Japan. So I went to Japan for two years, almost two years at the United World College there. Then I was asked to go to Lagos for a year. I did that. Now I’m working on educational projects but I’ve been asked to go back to Japan. So I’m going to go back in July of next year, ’27 as the interim for the second time.
INT: Oh wow. Would you mind if we go back for a moment Malcolm because I am conscious that leading a K through 12 school in Beijing through Covid, you know, is an incredibly unique experience.
RES: It was.
INT: And was wondering if you would mind reflecting a little bit on that just in terms of what did, you know, I imagine a significant portion of that was probably distance learning, or perhaps not for the boarding students.
RES: It was a strange thing about Beijing, it was probably much easier to be living through Covid in Beijing than in many other parts of the world, including other parts of China because the Chinese were very focused on protecting the capital.
[01:20:05]
So it was extremely difficult to get into Beijing, you had to through rigorous quarantine, three or four weeks to get in. But once you were there freedom of movement was quite easy. And we were shut down and taught online from February 2020 through to about May of that year. Towards the end of that school year our kids started coming back.
INT: Oh wow.
RES: And with one small and short exception in the next two years all our students were on campus. It was amazing.
INT: Wow. That’s incredible.
RES: And I could move around Beijing quite freely.
INT: Wow. And so you mentioned that you had already shared with the board that your tenure would end.
RES: Yeah. Yeah.
INT: Okay. And then you mentioned that kind of what is next is back to Japan.
RES: Back to Japan in 12 months time, 13 months time.
INT: And what excites you most about this, you know you have an incredible, have had an incredible career in global education at various levels. And was wondering if you would mind sharing a little bit about what excites you most about this current chapter. And the next chapter.
RES: Well right now I’m enjoying doing some of the things that I’m doing which are more project-based. I did not think that I would end up working full time in a school again after Lagos. But when I was asked to go back to Japan, you know, how could I say no? And it’s the UWC, it’s a remarkable school. And Japanese culture and society is so fascinating and profound. So what fascinates me about what I’m doing now? I think more than anything beginning to consider how I can leverage my experience to make some changes in curriculum. And I’m beginning to write about that more and more. I’ve just finished a draft chapter for a book on international education which will come out later this year.
INT: Wonderful. And you mentioned throughout our conversation having not anticipated that your career would be in education and I think you used the words perhaps falling into education in a way that was unanticipated.
RES: Yeah.
INT: But throughout, you know, throughout your career you have made such a significant impact on the life of children and families around the globe. And you know conscious that it may not have been a, a explicit decision at the start. I imagine certainly that the decision to stay in education was likely, you know, a thoughtful one throughout your career. And was wondering if you would mind reflecting a little bit on, you know, the decision to in the words of the Rhodes community, fight the world’s fight through education.
RES: Mmm, yeah. Well education amongst other things, but education certainly has to rank high when it comes to how you can impact people. Maybe not huge numbers but the multiplier effect can be significant if you- If I consider all the students that I have worked with over the years, I have impacted many of them I hope in positive ways. They have certainly impacted me but they have then gone on, you know, in their communities and with their own families and others to take some of those lessons. And that’s really important. I have never liked the phrase fight the world’s fight, I still don’t like it. I know it’s attributed to Rhodes. I’m not sure that he invented it. I think he probably got it from somewhere else. That’s okay. When I think about fighting the world’s fight I have my own formula where I change the ‘f’ to ‘r’ and I like righting the world’s right. And what I mean by that is that humans have a tendency towards fundamentalism I think. And we tend to believe that what we think is right is permanent. And we know it’s not. And every generation or every group of people looks back a century or more and says, how could intelligent people have done things like this? How could people have accepted slavery? So I think what Rhodes Scholars should be doing more than anything else is analysing what is, what seems right to their time and then righting that. In other words questioning it and turning it on its head. So I prefer to the right the world’s right than to fight the world’s fight.
INT: Righting the world’s right, that is, that’s really, that is really fascinating. We’ve spoken about your family a little bit Malcolm but was wondering if you would like to expand a little bit.
RES: Sure. Judith and I, as I said, were married in Oxford. We’ve been together a long time. We are still married but we live separately now and have done for three or four years. We have two children. Both are graduates of Atlantic College, Wales. And I like the fact that they do two such very different things because our son who is the older of the two is a professional chef. And our daughter works for Médecins sans Frontières and lives in Berlin. And I sometimes use that as a way of saying that you can do quite different things and still impact people in positive ways. I think chefs have a very important role to play. And then working for an NGO which has an international reach like Doctors without Borders is a different kind of way of influencing communities and the global community positively.
INT: Yeah. That’s beautiful. I would love to ask you a few questions about the Rhodes Scholarships. So the first being what impact would you say that the Rhodes Scholarship had on your life?
RES: I think it allowed me to grow into myself in ways that have stayed with me for the rest of my career. I think that the strength of purpose that I discovered in Oxford has been abiding. And it’s partly to do with my own family history but it’s also to do with a sense that you are a part of a family of scholars who are deeply motivated in ways that are designed to help other people and to serve. And not everyone is like that obviously but that was a sense that I have of my group and I think that’s been cultivated extremely well and intentionally in recent years.
INT: Lovely. We are, you know, approaching a really important milestone in the life of the Trust in that we are marking 50 years of Rhodes women next year in 2027, we are approaching the 125th anniversary of the scholarships in a few years. And this is a wonderful opportunity to reflect on the history of the Rhodes Scholarships which is one of our hopes for this oral history project. But also a very natural opportunity to look ahead to the next chapter of the Rhodes Scholarship. And so we’d love to know what your hopes for the future of the next scholarship, of the next chapter of the Rhodes Scholarship would be.
RES: I don’t really know when it comes to logistical things like expanding the number of scholars, expanding the reach. If we can continue to raise funds for bringing more people to Oxford both as full time traditional Rhodes Scholar students and in other ways, for short courses and things like that, that would be great. But I think I’m more interested in at least two aspects of what I think Rhodes Scholars should take away from the experience and bring into their own lives. And one is please be aware of the fact that this is an enormously privileged award. It’s something that 99.9% of the people in the world of our age as recently graduated students can’t even begin to dream of. So the privilege is immense and unusual and needs to be seen and respected.
[01:30:04]
And then alongside that I hope is the humility. And I don’t always see that or feel that when I’m in the company of Rhodes Scholars. So if I was, if I had any kind of leadership role in the Trust or had any influence in any way on how Rhodes Scholars should see themselves during and after their experience in Oxford, I would stress privilege and humility.
INT: Thank you. And this is a somewhat related question. But curious what advice you would give to today’s Rhodes Scholars.
RES: Well those two things for sure, definitely. Something that I didn’t do and it wasn’t as easy then I think to do it as it is now, is I didn’t make enough use, that’s putting it crudely, I didn’t learn enough from my fellow Rhodes Scholars as I could have. So I would encourage that. You know understand that you are part of a group of remarkably diverse people. How many scholars are there in Oxford now at any one time? Do you know?
INT: It’s approximately 105-ish per class.
RES: Per class.
INT: Per class, mhmm-hm.
RES: Yeah okay. So let’s just think of three classes, 300 students. Okay your 100 are going to be probably closer to you than the 100 immediately above you or immediately below you. But you’re probably not going to be part of a community as talented and as diverse as that ever again in your life of that size, you know. If you go to- If you go to- Let’s say you end up as a professor in a very well endowed college or university, you might be part of a community of 5,000 or 10,000 which is as diverse, or more diverse. But you’re never going to be in such a small tight diverse community again in your life. And use that as much as you can. Learn from the others in the cohort.
INT: Yeah. That’s wonderful advice.
RES: And that’s probably happening now more than I think it used to.
INT: And you know I’m- We, we were talking before we started recording about your class’s 50th reunion coming up and just, you know, the opportunities there for reconnection and continued learning from each other.
RES: Next year.
INT: Next year.
RES: 50, amazing.
INT: Well I was so grateful to you Malcolm for joining us in this initiative and would love to ask if there is anything else that we haven’t covered that you would like to share before we close?
RES: Probably when you get in your car and drive off I’ll think of 10 things.
INT: Well we can certainly resume then.
RES: But no, not right now. Yeah.
INT: Okay. Well with gratitude then I will end our recording there.
RES: Thank you. Thank you very much.
[Audio ends: 01:33:41]