Miss Barbara Jeanne Denning — Rotary's Ambassador to Lebanon

Miss Barbara Jeanne Denning is one of 85 graduates who took their degrees with distinction in 24 different countries and were thereupon granted scholarships enabling them to pursue their higher studies in the academic year 1950–1951 at the expense of the Rotary International Foundation. Miss Denning is now in Beirut, where she is studying Middle Eastern affairs at the American University of Beirut.

The Rotary Foundation numbers 337,000 members spread over more than 80 countries, who vie with one another in contributing to various works, all of which tend toward raising the standing of society and improving its conditions, toward fostering understanding among peoples, and toward establishing goodness and peace. Since 1947 the Foundation has followed the custom of giving scholarships to outstanding degree-holders, on the ground that they are its best ambassadors in the four quarters of the world. These scholarships are given for a single year, and their amount ranges between 1,800 and 3,400 dollars.

Miss Denning was chosen from the state of Colorado in the United States, where she was born twenty-two years ago. She studied at Stanford University in California, and in the summer of 1949 took the degree of Bachelor of Science in the branch of international relations. Throughout her secondary and university studies she won herself a wide reputation as a worker well versed in academic affairs and as a leader of student movements: now supervising social and recreational affairs at the university, now writing for its magazine; now presiding over the building in which she lived, now serving on the executive committee; she represented the women students on the committee for foreign missions, and the great magazine Mademoiselle elected her to its board, which includes representatives of the famous universities. In the summer holidays she wrote for the newspaper published in her home town.

She had previously held scholarships for four years.

Upon her graduation from Stanford University, Miss Denning worked in the American State Department in Washington, and, having received a grant, joined the evening classes of George Washington University. She hopes to return to the State Department as soon as the year is over and she is back from Lebanon.