Rhodes Scholar Arthur Whitaker received the BA from UT in 1916, having served as editor of both the school newspaper and the yearbook. He was a member of the tennis team and the debating squad and president of Chi Delta. He entered Harvard in 1916 and received the MA in 1917. He was named a Rhodes Scholar in 1917, but World War I prevented his taking advantage of the scholarship. After the war, he could not accept the scholarship because he had married (until 1976 Rhodes Scholars had to be unmarried).
Following his service in the war, he studied at the Sorbonne and earned a PhD in history at Harvard. He taught briefly at UT and several other institutions before spending six years on the faculty at Cornell and then moving to the University of Pennsylvania for the remainder of his career as holder of a chair in Latin American history. He authored more than 20 books. He received two Guggenheim fellowships, the Serra Award of the Americas, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society. He was elected a fellow of learned societies in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Colombia.