Hometown: Memphis, Tennessee
Major: Anthropology and Sociology
Extracurricular Activities: Clarence Day Scholar, President’s Commission on Campus Culture, Co-Founder of Rhodes United, Head Resident Assistant, Chi Omega Secretary, Founder of Anthropology and Sociology Peer Tutoring Program, Omicron Delta Kappa, President of Order of Omega, Rho Lambda, Redhots Dance Team
Chloe Moore ‘16 didn’t expect to go to school in the same city she had always called home, but once she got to Rhodes she fully embraced all that the college has to offer. In the process, she found her passion for leadership and human rights.
Chloe is a member of the second class of Clarence Day Scholars, a scholarship program dedicated to attracting outstanding Memphis-area students with the hope that graduates of the program will choose to stay in Memphis and reinvest in the city. Inspired by St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Chloe originally intended to follow a pre-med track and eventually become a pediatric oncologist. However, in Introduction to Anthropology during her first year, Chloe discovered a different path.
“My horizons were broadened in ways I never expected. I was focusing on people, different cultures, and getting to know the genuineness that makes the human experience so messy and so wonderful at the same time.” For Chloe, being able to make connections to other peoples and their experiences in a genuine and raw, yet still academic, setting sealed the deal for anthropology and sociology.
Chloe’s belief in supporting others is a reason that she became a residential advisor her sophomore year, but she also used this trait to help the campus as a whole in a much more powerful role. She is one of the co-founders of Rhodes United, a student organization founded last year when a coalition of student leaders met to formalize the need for social justice advocacy on the campus. The main goal of the group is to work with the administration to change campus policies to make them more inclusive of all community members. Working with campus leaders, faculty, staff, and Rhodes United, President Troutt formed the Commission on Campus Culture to act as a task force to evaluate campus culture and claims of inclusivity problems. Chloe was nominated by her peers to be one of the three student representatives on the commission.
To Chloe, seeing faculty, staff, and her peers collectively committing to improving the campus is encouraging. The commission put in many hours, and welcomed suggestions and held hearings for anyone who wanted to make their voice heard. From those insights, they created a report that is currently on the Rhodes website.
Chloe took her studies abroad this past summer as a research intern in Trinidad and Tobago with the MHIRT program through the National Institutes of Health. Her goal was to learn about the experiences of people living with disabilities in Trinidad and to understand the degree to which their needs and rights are being understood and addressed. Being able to apply what she had learned in her academic studies in a context outside of Rhodes was incredibly meaningful to Chloe, especially as Trinidad and Tobago is her mother’s home country.
Her overall trajectory is leading her to human rights law, with a focus on advocacy through policy to effect structural change. “I find it hard to narrow my passions sometimes because I am interested in a lot of things,” says Chloe. “But I can tell you that, at the very foundation of it all, is the fight for human dignity. That is what I will spend my life doing. Before law school, I see myself working in a way that will better cultivate my understanding of human rights, what that means for people, and how I can best serve in a role that unequivocally fights for human dignity. Thus, I will be using the next year or two to explore my thoughts on human dignity and what my commitment to that ideal will look like through my life.”
By Lizzie Choy '17
