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The director of the Rhodes Trust’s Atlantic Institute says a strategy is needed to increase the number of Māori Rhodes Scholars.
Evie O’Brien, a former deputy chief executive at Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi, says only three of the more than 247 New Zealand Rhodes scholars selected since 1904 were Māori.
She’s currently hosting a delegation of 13 Māori graduate student candidates as part of a new initiative to open up opportunities with Oxford University in the United Kingdom.
The tour also celebrates Oxford’s first wahine Māori student, Mākereti Papakura, who died in 1930 just two weeks before her thesis on the customs of Te Arawa was due for examination.
The programme includes the inaugural Mākereti Papakura Memorial lecture at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History delivered by the University of Waikato, Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith.
The students are sponsored by iwi and Te Pūtea Whakatupu Trust.
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