During my junior year at Yale, I decided to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship. Awarded annually to 32 Americans, the Rhodes provides full funding for graduate study at Oxford University. Robert Penn Warren, Bill Clinton, Kris Kristofferson, Terrence Malick, Susan Rice, Rachel Maddow, and Pete Buttigieg are among its alumni.
Two years earlier, in 2002, the selection of a Yale senior named Chesa Boudin had made the front page of The New York Times. Titled “From a Radical Background, a Rhodes Scholar Emerges,” the article detailed Boudin’s highly unusual life story. When he was 14 months old, his parents, both former members of the Weather Underground, were incarcerated for their role in a 1981 Brink’s heist in Nyack, New York, that left a security guard and two police officers dead, one of whom was the first Black cop on the force. Boudin was raised by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, onetime leaders of the Weather Underground—the latter an alumna of the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted List. “My parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world,” Boudin told The New York Times. “I’m dedicated to the same thing.”
