Orville Schell - Background and Education

Background and Education

Schell's father Orville Hickok Schell, Jr., was a prominent lawyer who headed the New York City Bar Association, chaired the human rights group Americas Watch from its founding in 1981 until his death in 1987, co-founded Helsinki Watch, forerunner to Human Rights Watch, and became the namesake of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. Orville Schell III is the older brother of writer Jonathan Schell.

Schell attended Pomfret School in Connecticut, after which he attended Harvard University, leaving in 1960 after his junior year to study Chinese, first at Stanford University and then at National Taiwan University from 1961-1964. While in Taiwan, Schell began writing columns for the Boston Globe as its "Man in Asia." He then returned to Harvard and studied Asian history, culture and politics under John Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer, and completed his bachelor's degree in 1964.

In 1964-65 Schell worked for the Ford Foundation in Djakarta, Indonesia. He then pursued Chinese studies at the University of California, Berkeley, earning a master's degree in 1967, becoming researcher for sociology and history professor Franz Schurmann (head of the school's Center for Chinese Studies) on a three-volume work The China Reader (1967, Random House). Schell was named as a co-author, establishing him as a China scholar, expert and pundit on Asia.

Schell continued his academic studies at University of California, Berkeley, completing all but his Ph.D. dissertation. As anti-Vietnam War protests shook the campus, he became involved in anti-war activism and journalism, and in 1967 he signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse to pay tax as a protest against the Vietnam War.