Ralph Smith

‘I thought it would be great if I could go to school abroad’ 

I was born in New Mexico, but that was really just a coincidence of military posting. My family moved to Birmingham, Alabama when I was five, and I have been here on and off ever since. My education was unremarkable. I went through the public school system and I was always a good student and I enjoyed learning, though I was never top in my class. I was always interested in sports too, as a fan and as a player. I played baseball through my first year in college. Alongside that, I loved to read.   

I went on to Washington and Lee University, which was a very popular school in our region. I was an English major, but by the time I was a senior, I was fairly fixed on the idea of going to law school. When one of the faculty members asked about my plans for the future, I told him I was interested in law school but I thought it would be great if I could go study abroad for a time. He said, ‘Well, why don’t you consider the Rhodes Scholarship?’ My response was, ‘Wow, well, I don’t know that I would be qualified,’ but he encouraged me. 

On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship 

The Scholarship application process was a good experience. Writing the personal statement prompted me to think through what my goals and objectives were. As the time for the interviews drew near, I had some anxious moments. Those were the first really substantive interviews I’d ever had, and they were very vigorous and challenging. I remember talking about current events and being asked about my favourite authors or about artists or people in the news. I found it very stimulating.  

When we got to the point where the secretary was announcing the winners, he read our names off alphabetically. When he read “Smith”, the first thing that ran through my mind was, ‘I wonder if there’s more than one “Smith”!’ But I was just so elated and happy. I called my parents and then I called Betsy. She was studying at Sweet Briar. We met on a blind date in our sophomore year. It was such an exciting opportunity to go to Oxford, but we knew we’d miss each other and have to be apart for many months. We were pretty naïve about everything then, and I remember we got a couple of guidebooks about England. We read that they drank sherry, so we went out and bought a bottle of New York sherry and, as we sampled it, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s the life that I’ll be living.’  

‘Everything about Oxford was different’ 

I sailed over to England with my Rhodes classmates. I remember that the Yom Kippur War broke out when we were mid-ocean. We weren’t anxious that we would be targets of anything, but we all gathered round the Scholars from West Point and the Air Force Academy, asking their opinions about what was happening. It was a total immersion in the real world of international politics and warfare, right there on the ship.  

Arriving in Oxford was nerve-wracking in some ways and exciting in others. Everything about Oxford was different from my undergraduate experience. College life was about small social gatherings, and the one-on-one tutorials were both very stimulating and very challenging. I’d originally applied to read English, but the chairman of the selection committee had taken me aside and suggested PPE instead, and that was a great choice. I continued in my love of literature, but studying philosophy, politics and economics really opened up a broader range of other things that proved to be quite helpful in my later law career and just in my intellectual development generally.   

Betsy was still in the US, working in Gainesville, Florida and we wrote to each other and occasionally called, but staying in touch was nowhere as easy as it is now. In March of my first year, we got engaged. The rule then was that Rhodes Scholars couldn’t be married in their first year at Oxford, so, we got married in July and then came over to the UK. Sailing over as a couple was like an extended honeymoon. We spent the summer travelling and then, at the start of my second year, we moved into this wonderful sixteenth-century house right off Magpie Lane.  “Kybald Twychen.” Betsy and I will both tell you that it was pretty overwhelming at first, especially shopping in the Covered Market where the meat was hanging up outside the butcher’s, with the hooves still on! But we got to love it, and there was a real sense of community, especially with other married couples in my class. Betsy had a job working on a research project in local education, and when we had vacations, we were on the road almost all the time. It was a magical period.   

‘I’ve always been interested in education’ 

After Oxford, in the early fall, we went up to New Haven because I was heading to Yale Law School. We were working and studying, and then life changed again with the birth of our first son. Once I’d graduated, we moved to Washington, DC, and by then, a lot of the other Rhodes Scholars we knew were also working nearby and were having children, so our families would all get together. It was such a fun part of our experience, but the call of home began to get stronger and stronger. So, a few years after that, we moved back and we’ve been in Birmingham ever since. I joined another law firm, where I developed a speciality in representing healthcare organizations and family-owned companies; some of the work I’m proudest of was in helping those businesses resolve their issues amicably and without confrontation.   

I’d been in private practice around 25 years when I was asked to become general counsel for the University of Alabama System. I’d always been interested in education, and by that time I’d been very active for some time in administering the Rhodes programme in the US, so I jumped at the chance. I had a wonderful time there. I taught in the law school, and I even got to negotiate the contract for Nick Saban, bringing one of the greatest football coaches of all times to the University of Alabama. I was working with the chancellor of the university to develop international collaborations, and I began to realise just how much I enjoyed using my contacts to work on things that would make the world a better place. That’s what led me to set up the Ralph Smith Group, and a lot of our clients over the years have been academic institutions or companies that want access to the intellectual know-how of universities.

‘Savour the experience’ 

The Rhodes Scholarship was a transformational experience for Betsy and for me, and at such an important point in our young lives. I was so much the beneficiary of this unexpected largesse that I always felt I wanted to do whatever I could to help keep the Scholarship strong. In my work on selection committees over many years, my goal was to make students feel positive about their experience. The winners always think it’s a great process, but to have the other applicants feel it was positive and beneficial has been very gratifying. Betsy’s role has been extensive too, and she is the one who’s made a success of a number of our initiatives. Many of the students we’ve met have stayed in touch with us, and they are enormously inspiring.   

To today’s Rhodes Scholars, I think we would both say, savour the experience. Don’t rush. Be open to everything, and really enjoy your time in Oxford. Rhodes Scholars have made such a great contribution to the world, and we need to keep on doing whatever we can to bring people of different cultures and nationalities together. Our hope is that, through programmes like the Rhodes, one day, we will understand each other more and get along better. The world needs that.