Rutgers University

Rutgers University is the center of a consequential but unrealized educational opportunity in the Roth family’s story. When Abe Steinheim offers to secure Alvin Roth a fully funded place there, the university represents a route from Alvin’s work as Steinheim’s chauffeur to a different future; Alvin’s departure for Canada before he can take it turns that promise into the focus of a bitter dispute about education, labor, and moral obligation.

The scholarship offer

Abe plans for Alvin to begin as a freshman in New Brunswick in September 1941. To make that possible, he calls the president of Rutgers and insists that Alvin’s high-school standing should not bar him: Alvin is an orphan and, in Abe’s judgment, potentially a genius. Abe demands a full scholarship and offers, in exchange, to build the university a college building. His promise is extravagant, but its terms are concrete: Alvin is to receive four years of college at no expense to himself.

Abe presents the offer as both an investment in Alvin and a future for him in the building business. He tells Alvin that after graduating Phi Beta Kappa, the two of them can sit down and talk. The plan would have taken Alvin from chauffeur to student and, eventually, brought him back into Abe’s company as someone with a position of his own.

A future Alvin refuses

The proposed path never begins. In February, before the September start, Alvin leaves for Canada. After weeks of arguments with Herman Roth, he takes the express train from Newark Penn Station to Montreal without telling the family in advance. Rutgers thus remains a possibility offered but not accepted: the evidence does not place Alvin on campus or establish that the promised scholarship was formally completed.

For Herman, the opportunity is a four-year education Alvin has missed out on and can now have. He urges his nephew not to throw it away in order to fight Hitler. Alvin sees the offer differently. Because Abe uses his wealth and influence to obtain the place, Alvin fears becoming indebted to him and eventually bound to his business and household. His refusal is not presented as a rejection of education itself so much as a rejection of the obligations he believes this particular opportunity would impose.

The argument over obligation

The dispute exposes sharply different standards of responsibility. Herman defends Abe as a builder whose work is part of a cutthroat industry, distinguishing him from a thief and arguing that his offer could give Alvin a valuable future. Alvin counters that Abe exploits workingmen and that accepting his generosity would make Alvin complicit in a relationship he condemns. He also resents the prospect of being absorbed into Abe’s family and business, where, as Alvin sees it, the sons’ lives are organized around their father’s control and eventual inheritance.

Herman answers that family life includes both peace and conflict, and that a family’s difficulties are no reason to abandon a college education. Alvin, in turn, links Herman’s defense of the offer to what he calls isolationism and compares Herman’s position with that of Lionel Bengelsdorf. In this exchange, Rutgers is more than the name of a university: it is the practical prize around which the family’s incompatible judgments about education, work, loyalty, and resistance converge. Alvin’s journey to Canada leaves that prize behind, while the argument shows why a free place at college cannot, for him, be separated from the price he believes it carries.