A Rhodes claim that does not hold

1941 — 2016

One Fort Wayne Rhodes claim in print fails its check, and the ledger prints it as a claim. The published obituary of Sharon Adele Ruhl DesRosiers (1941–2016), born and raised in Fort Wayne, says she "attended Indiana University as a Rhodes Scholar" and earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in comparative literature there. The Rhodes Scholarship is not held at Indiana University — it is tenable at the University of Oxford — and women were not eligible for it until the Rhodes class of 1977, by which time DesRosiers's Indiana degrees were long complete; her name does not appear in the Rhodes Trust's scholar records as reached. What the record supports is the education itself: a Fort Wayne woman who took two degrees in comparative literature at Indiana University and made a life in letters. Obituaries are family documents and repeat family memory kindly; the roster governs, and by the roster this honor was not hers. The entry stands here so that the claim, which circulates, meets its answer in the same place Fort Wayne's real honors are kept.

Sources:

1. Obituary of Sharon Adele Ruhl DesRosiers, Dignity Memorial (2016) — the claim as published, and the Indiana University degrees it records.
2. Rhodes Trust — the scholarship's terms (tenable at the University of Oxford) and eligibility history (women first selected for the class of 1977); the Trust's scholar records, searched for her name without result.