Calkins: Justice Amy Coney Barrett is speaking at Rhodes. It’s more complicated than it should be.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett attended President Donald Trump's State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 24. (Alex Brandon/AP)
Geoff Calkins
Geoff Calkins has been chronicling Memphis and Memphis sports for more than two decades. Calkins has been named the best sports columnist in the country five times by the Associated Press sports editors, but still figures his best columns are about the people who make Memphis what it is.
This Wednesday, March 18, is a complicated day at Rhodes College, where Amy Coney Barrett will be returning to the college for the first time since she was elevated to the Supreme Court in 2020.
By any measure, Barrett is a brilliant, admirable woman: an alumnus that Rhodes should be celebrating as evidence of the impact their graduates can have on the world.
She is the only justice who did not attend an Ivy League school. She is just the fifth woman to serve on the Supreme Court — and the first who is the mother of school-age children.
What a story for the college to tell!
But it doesn’t tell that story.
Not loudly, anyway.
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Calkins: For 100 years, Memphis and Rhodes have needed each other. That’s truer than ever today.
Rhodes moved from Clarksville to Memphis in September 1925. A hundred years later, the college and the city still rely on each other to thrive.
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