<p>Can’t post the link without a subscription, but here, from a Parents Forum post by samuck, is one of today’s editorials in the London Times</p>
<p>November 23 2011 12:01AM</p>
<p>Don’t some people make the dumbest decisions? Patrick Witt, a student at Yale, faced a choice. He could lead his team out against Harvard in a match so steeped in college football folklore that it is known simply as “The Game”, or he could attend his final interviews to bag a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. Guess which of the two Witt chose? He chose to play football. Yale lost.</p>
<p>No, that wasn’t the dumb decision. This is: the Rhodes Trust was so thrown (“We have candidates every year miss games for the interview,” it said grandly) that it refused to reschedule Witt’s interview. Witt felt he had to withdraw his application. In a test of priorities, the Rhodes Trust has shown that it, and not Witt, has the wrong ones. “It’s a matter of principle,” Witt tells The Times. “It wouldn’t be right as the quarterback, the leader of your team, to turn your back on them for something that’s entirely selfish in nature.”</p>
<p>In founding the scholarships, Cecil Rhodes said that he did not want “merely bookworms”. He sought candidates who had “success in manly outdoor sports”; also people “of moral force and character and of instincts to lead and to take an interest in his schoolmates”. It could be a prize crafted with Witt in mind. As for Oxford, while it chooses not to interfere in the selection process, its reticence in this instance brings dishonour on the university.</p>
<p>Witt is not just Yale’s quarterback. He is among the greatest in Yale’s history. He realised that had he opted to skip the game, he wouldn’t have been “acting like the person they selected to interview”. It is sobering that this student can recognise what the Rhodes selectors cannot: Patrick Witt’s choice should be all the proof the trust needs to reassure itself that it has found a worthy Rhodes Scholar. "</p>