ON THE Bard College students have won many of the academic world’s most prestigious awards and honors, but the Rhodes Scholarship has been elusive. Many have applied, and a few have been named finalists, but Sonita Alizada ’23 became the first to earn that fully funded award for postgraduate study at the University of Oxford while still an undergraduate. (Ronan Farrow ’04 won a Rhodes in 2012.) Alizada, who was born in Herat, Afghanistan, is one of only two applicants to receive a 2022 Global Rhodes, which is available to students from the approximately 170 nations that are not members of established Rhodes constituencies. In addition to being an outstanding scholar and deeply engaged in the Bard community, Alizada is an outspoken human rights advocate, artist, and rapper. As a child, she and her family left Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, walking hundreds of miles to Iran. She grew up, as she describes it, “an impoverished, undocumented, refugee street child in Tehran.” At 10, she was sold into a forced marriage, but that contract fell through. She was unable to attend school until a local nongovernmental organization that provided basic education to undocumented Afghan children offered assistance. She learned to read and write, and developed an interest in music. Her family tried again to sell her when she was 16, in order to raise funds for her brother to buy his bride, but rather than return to Afghanistan to meet her future husband, she recorded a song, “Daughters for Sale,” and uploaded a music video to YouTube. The video helped change her family’s mind, and it has been viewed more than 1.5 million times since she first posted it. Alizada moved to the United States in 2015, and she has continued to advocate for change, addressing the United Nations; working with organizations such as Girls Not Brides, Global Partnership for Education, and Global Women’s Empowerment Network; and founding Arezo, a Trustee Leader Scholar–initiated project that raises money to support impoverished children in Herat.
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Sonita Alizada ’23, photo by Michael Friberg