Our Oxford Connection

In 2003 the Dakota Foundation established and endowed a scholarship at the U.S. Air Force Academy that annually sends a top Academy graduate to Exeter College at England’s Oxford University for two years of graduate study.

The scholarship each year enables a top-ranking cadet who competes for, but does not receive, a Rhodes Scholarship, to do his or her graduate work at Oxford.

To date, eight outstanding young men and women have benefitted from the Alberta Bart Holaday Scholarship which is named in honor of Bart Holaday’s mother, 93, a Colorado native and longtime resident of Jamestown, N.D. Holaday, a Rhodes Scholar himself from 1965-68, credits his mother, a former English teacher, for impressing upon him him as a young man, “that education and life are synonymous.”

“My wife Lynn and I believe each new experience in life increases one’s knowledge of him- or herself, of fellow citizens and of the world.,” Holaday said.

Following his graduation from the Air Force Academy, Holaday spent three years at Exeter College, earning a master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics. At the Academy he was an economics major.

In establishing the scholarship, Holaday was inspired by the vision of the late Cecil Rhodes who sought to reward young men and women “who demonstrate literary and scholastic attainments, energy to use one’s talents to the full.”

Rhodes believed that these talented individuals also are exemplified by “a fondness for and success in sports, a devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship, moral force of character and instincts to lead and take an interest in one’s fellow beings.”

Holaday views his own Oxford experience as having provided “an invaluable global perspective” thanks to the university’s location, its international student body and its stellar faculty. “I believe such global understanding is crucial for future Air Force leaders,” he said.

Exeter College, soon to celebrate its 700 th anniversary, enthusiastically welcomes the young scholars who have come its way via the Holaday Scholarship, and who have entered fully into the life of the college. They are as follows:

2003 – Justin C. Bronder		2007 – Erin Finger
2004 – Katie Dildy Goossen		2008 – Ian Helms
2005 – Andrew Sellars		2009 – Roni Yadlin
2006 – Michael Cole		2010 – Bradford D. Waldie