Earlham College – a private liberal arts school with Quaker roots – is home to about 1,050 students in Richmond, Indiana. This year, one of its seniors, Summia Tora, will be the first Afghan to win the Rhodes Scholarship, one of the most prestigious academic awards, which funds three years of graduate studies at Oxford University.
This is the second time an Earlham student has won. The school’s peace and global studies department produced two Rhodes Scholars in the last three years, and the students – Tora and Hashem Abu Sham’a – have something else in common. Both plan to study and work with refugees and were once refugees themselves.
Tora, double majoring in peace and global studies and economics, grew up in Pakistan after her family fled violence in Afghanistan. She came to the United States at age 16 when she received a scholarship to study at the United World College in Montezuma, New Mexico, for the last two years of high school. There, she started doing advocacy for refugees and undocumented immigrants with Amnesty International. In college, she interned with Exodus Refugee Immigration in Indianapolis, where she worked closely with Burmese, Congolese and Afghan refugees.
The refugee women – many of them single parents – reminded her of her mother, who raised her and her siblings alone in Pakistan when her father returned to Afghanistan.
“I wanted to keep working in the field because working with displaced communities, there’s a sense of this belonging I feel, because I can relate,” Tora said. “When I speak to someone who’s experienced displacement, there’s a connection. You can’t have that connection until you’ve gone through it.”
Starting in fall 2020, Tora plans to take courses in refugee studies, forced migration studies and social entrepreneurship at Oxford.
But going to Oxford wasn’t an easy decision. When she applied, she wrestled with the Rhodes Scholarship’s colonial history. It’s a tension Abu Sham’a feels too, and the two of them discussed it when Tora came to visit Oxford. Cecil Rhodes, the scholarship’s namesake, was the British prime minister of a colony in South Africa.
