Thammasat University students interested in education, international exchange, cultural diplomacy, soft power, sociology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 7 January Zoom webinar on Geopolitical Implications of Educational Diplomacy: The Fulbright Program, 1958–2023.
The event, on Tuesday, 7 January 2025 at 9pm Bangkok time, is presented by The Centre for Global Higher Education, the United Kingdom.
Students are invited to register at this link:
The TU Library collection includes research about different aspects of The Fulbright Program.
The Fulbright Program is one of several United States cultural exchange programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of the United States and other countries through the exchange of persons, knowledge, and skills.
Through the program, competitively-selected American citizens including students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists, and artists may receive scholarships or grants to study, conduct research, teach, or exercise their talents abroad; and citizens of other countries may qualify to do the same in the United States.
The program was founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946 and has been considered one of the most prestigious scholarships in the United States.
The program provides approximately 8,000 grants annually, comprising roughly 1,600 grants to U.S. students, 1,200 to U.S. scholars, 4,000 to foreign students, 900 to foreign visiting scholars, and several hundred to teachers and professionals.
The Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) researches the inequalities within, and consequences of, the globalisation of higher education.
It is an inclusive and internationalist network of researchers, with a particular focus on the issues facing higher education in the majority world.
CGHE is overseen by a leadership team, made up of a director and six deputy directors from CGHE’s university partners: University College London (UCL), University of Johannesburg, University of Oxford, University of Lancaster, University of Birmingham and Hang Seng University.
The event announcement notes:
The Fulbright Program serves as a prominent example of educational diplomacy policy. This study combines archival research and critical discourse analysis to examine 33 evaluation and report documents that evaluate the effectiveness of the Fulbright Program from 1958–2023. Marisa employed argumentation analysis to understand the underlying ideological strategies used to discursively construct the Fulbright Program’s multiple purposes. The study finds that the documents argue that education and mutual understanding are ephemeral concepts, the Fulbright Program has geopolitical justifications, and academic disciplines are a source of geopolitical power. This approach to analyzing the Fulbright Program’s historical documents provides a model for understanding educational diplomacy schemes that use higher education as a geopolitical tool.
About the Speaker
Dr. Marisa Lally is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the Advancing Collaborations for Equity in Marine & Climate Science project at George Mason University. Her research interests include nationalism in international higher education, history of higher education, and discourse analysis methods.
In 2021, a blog was posted on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations, noting, in part:
The Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (FFSB) was created in 1947 to decide which students and international institutions were qualified to participate. To insulate the scholarships from politics, members of the FFSB are presidentially-appointed and chosen from private rather than public life. Once a country signs a Fulbright agreement with the United States, a binational commission is created to decide how the program will operate in the host country.
You might think the Fulbright Program favors scholars from traditional academic disciplines like English or economics. But the program has sought since its creation to recruit talented individuals from all disciplines, and not just from university campuses. In 1968, for example, Ronald Radford received a Fulbright arts grant to study flamenco guitar with Spanish masters Diego del Gastor and Paco de Lucia. Eleanor King, the director of the dance program at the University of Arkansas from 1952 to 1972, received two Fulbright scholarships in the 1960s to research dance in Japan. Playwright Edward Albee, author John Updike, soprano Renee Fleming, and actor John Lithgow have all have been awarded Fulbrights.
But even as the Fulbright Program championed peace and open-mindedness, Senator Fulbright didn’t always practice those ideals at home. Throughout his decades on Capitol Hill, which saw him rise to become the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he consistently voted in support of racial segregation in education and against civil rights legislation. His hypocrisy, which the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs that sponsors the program now recognizes, is obvious and upsetting. And, for all his support of the creation of the FFSB, Fulbright originally wanted Americans abroad to engage in a form of cultural imperialism, spreading American ideals while remaining immune to those of foreign countries. Instead of promoting understanding and toleration, then, his idea of peace between nations rested more on cultural domination.
In its seventy-five years, the Fulbright Program has become the foremost international exchange program, reaching over 160 countries on six continents. Each year, about 2,000 U.S. students and 800 U.S. scholars receive Fulbright awards, as do 4,000 foreign students and 900 foreign scholars. Sixty Fulbright alumni have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, seventy-five have become MacArthur Foundation Fellows, eighty-nine have won Pulitzer Prizes, and thirty-nine have become heads of state.
The program’s prestige and success haven’t made it impervious to criticism, though. In the 1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy denounced it for importing communism into the United States. Three decades later, President Ronald Reagan tried, unsuccessfully, to cut the program’s budget in half. And it’s not just Republicans who have sought to pare back the Fulbright Program—Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both sought budget cuts. Most recently, President Donald Trump called for slashing the Fulbright budget by 71 percent. Congress ignored that request, as it had similar calls in the past. It instead increased the budget by $800,000 in the 2020-21 fiscal year. Both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill see the Fulbright Program highlighting the best of American values and promoting American interests abroad.
It’s likely that none of the people involved in the creation of the Fulbright Program foresaw how successful it would become. And initially it looked as if bureaucratic politics and competing priorities would push it into the ash heap of failed policy initiatives. But after its faltering start, the Fulbright Program blossomed into one of the great policy successes of the early Cold War and one of the great tools of U.S. soft power. The evidence is in the program’s reach: six continents, 160+ countries, and 400,000 scholars.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)