University of Louisville graduate named Rhodes scholar
Monica Marks grew up among fundamentalist Jehovah’s Witnesses in Eastern Kentucky — craving books and learning in a community where education wasn’t valued.
Today the University of Louisville graduate is the state's latest Rhodes scholar, the winner of one of the most coveted awards in academia.
“Growing up, the discussion wasn’t about what college you would go to, it was whether or not you were even going to college,” she said. “The idea of going to university and getting a degree, much less getting a Rhodes, didn’t even fall within our purview.”
At 23 years of age, her studies in Islamic law have already taken her around the globe to places like Jordan, Tanzania and Tunisia. She’s now studying in Turkey during her year as a Fulbright Scholar — the prestigious academic award she won last year.
It’s far from her youth in Rush, Ky., where she went on sales calls with her father Jesse, who owns a small business that sells plastic bags and other janitorial products. She helped him on “floor jobs,” what they called the cleaning jobs he did on weekends to make extra money.
Neither of her parents graduated from high school, and no one in her extended family went to college.
As a child she begged her parents to send her outside of her own school district — to Russell Independent Middle and High schools — because they were the best schools in the area. And she said she constantly asked her parents for books to feed her voracious appetite for reading.
Marks credits her father with letting her stray from church teachings to make a better life for herself.
Jesse Marks was an elder in the local Jehovah’s Witness church — a church she said focused on preparing for the apocalypse.
“They believed that college was unnecessary and you were derided for pursuing college,” she said.
Many saw college as “a prideful waste of time” and a means to acquire the material goods that the church frowned upon, she said.
“I was an insatiable reader and my parents got me books,” she said. “I read all the things I wasn’t supposed to read about — philosophy, feminism … I realized at an early age that I didn’t just want to read about things, that I would have to explore bigger things and that education was part and parcel to that.”
Shouldn't she have followed Freddy Franz' advice and turned down the opportunity to be a stupid cult leader or something? :-)
Randy