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The Fulbright Program has a spectacular history. Begun as a tentative enterprise financed by windfalls of foreign currency, it grew into one of the world's greatest programs for educational exchange. That it represents the United States' first major commitment to international cultural relations, worldwide, makes its success even more remarkable.
This lively account by two of the Program's "charter" members traces the Program from the Fulbright Act of 1946 to its indorsement by Congress as a permanent feature of United States foreign policy in the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961. It tells of the struggle for quality in shaping a program for the interchange of American students and teachers at a time when few precedents were available as guideposts. "The educational programs described in this book," writes Senator Fulbright in his Foreword, "embody a large part of America's effort to be both a teacher and a pupil in the world arena." Financial support, sometimes precarious at first, and the need for adjusting American resources for the Program to widely varying conditions among the other participating countries challenged American ingenuity and good will.
Focusing on the roles played by the American people themselves, the authors show how private groups---universities, colleges, foundations---helped to make the program work by co-operating with time and money. Even its administrators depended heavily on individual volunteers who served as advisers and on screening committees because they believed that educators, and not impersonal agencies, should select recipients.
WALTER JOHNSON, Preston and Sterling Morton Professor of History, The University of Chicago, has served the Fulbright Program as a member of the Board of Foreign Scholarships from 1947 to 1954, from 1950 to 1953 as chairman. Since 1962 he has been a member of The United States Advisory Committee on International and Cultural Affairs.
FRANCIS J. COLLIGAN is Director of Policy Review and Coordination for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Department of State. Affiliated with the Program since 1947, he was executive secretary from 1948 to 1957. In 1955 he received a Rockefeller Public Service Award.
CIVILIZATION, says Webster, is that "ideal state of human culture characterized by the complete absence of barbarism and non-rational behavior---the optimum utilization of physical, cultural, spiritual, and human resources, and the perfect adjustment of the individual within the social framework."
Thus defined, civilization is what educational exchange programs are all about. They are concerned in part with increasing man's knowledge of science and the arts. But they are primarily concerned with increasing man's understanding of himself and of the national and world societies in which he lives.
Americans and Europeans are prone to thinking of their own societies as the center and source of world civilization, forgetting that the West is only one of the world's great cultures, and forgetting also that some of the most barbarous physical and intellectual slaughters of all history have taken place in the West within our lifetime. It follows, I believe, that man's struggle to be rational about himself, about his relationship to his own society and to other peoples and nations involves a constant search for understanding among all peoples and all cultures---a search that can only be effective when learning is pursued on a worldwide basis. The educational exchange program is built on this premise, which, stated in another way, holds that America has much to teach in the world but also much to learn, and that the greater our intellectual involvement with the world beyond our frontiers, the greater the gain for both America and the world.
The educational exchange programs described in this book embody a large part of America's effort to be both a teacher and a pupil in the world arena. In furtherance of this objective, the United States since the end of World War II has encouraged Americans to study and travel abroad and foreigners to study and travel in the United States. The national purpose, in the words of the basic legislation, has been "to increase mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States and the people of other countries; to strengthen the ties which unite us with other nations by demonstrating the educational and cultural interests, developments, and achievements of the people of the United States and other nations, and the contributions being made toward a peaceful and more fruitful life for people throughout the world; to promote international cooperation for educational and cultural advancement; and thus to assist in the development of friendly, sympathetic, and peaceful relations between the United States and the other countries of the world."
The objectives of the educational exchange program cannot be quickly realized and are not measurable in immediate tangible returns. The program has everything to do with the cultivation of ideas and values and little to do with fostering "images." Unfortunately, the distinction between education and propaganda is sometimes forgotten and pressures are brought to bear to use educational exchange for short-range and shortsighted political purposes. Thus financial support is sometimes cut back because the program fails to yield the kind of propaganda results that are properly associated with the Voice of America or Radio Free Europe but have no place in programs of scholarship and intellectual creativity.
There is nothing obscure about the objective of educational exchange. Its purpose is to acquaint Americans with the world as it is and to acquaint students and scholars from many lands with America as it is---not as we wish it were or as we might wish foreigners to see it, but exactly as it is---which, by my reckoning, is an "image" of which no American need be ashamed. The program further aims to make the benefits of American culture and technology available to the world and to enrich American life by exposing it to the science and art of many societies. Finally, the program aims, through these means, to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship.
In 1952 and 1953, the Committee on Foreign Relations undertook a study of the overseas information programs of the United States. First under Democratic chairmanship and then under Republican chairmanship, the committee examined all the means by which the United States was seeking to improve worldwide appreciation of the values of a free society and to encourage international understanding. The committee obtained the views of overseas American diplomats, representatives of religious and charitable institutions, and business representatives, as well as the views of non-Americans competent to evaluate the effectiveness of such communication media as radio, television, motion pictures, libraries, press services, and educational exchange programs. Of all activities of this kind carried on by the United States, directly or indirectly, there was unanimous agreement that the exchange of persons programs were the most effective and, at the same time, among the lowest in cost. The Committee on Foreign Relations, without a dissenting voice, concurred in that view and recommended that such programs be strengthened. These programs are as important today as they were a decade ago, and because they are, the present volume is a most welcome contribution to the better understanding of education in international relations.
Francis J. Colligan and Walter Johnson, the authors of this study, have been intimately associated with the postwar activities of the United States in the field of educational exchange. Because of their long and close association with educational exchange programs, they are able to tell the story of their development with more intimacy and detail and understanding than an outsider. They have produced a definitive and fascinating history. They have revealed some of the trials and tribulations of getting exchange programs started, keeping them going, and maintaining morale during the dark and discouraging days of the McCarthy period. They have put into perspective problems upon which able and conscientious educators and administrators have differed. And they have recorded some of the spectacular successes of educational exchange programs that have stood the test of time.
J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT
IN THIS BOOK we are writing about the Fulbright Program, that venture in international educational and scholarly interchange between the United States and other countries which was authorized by Public Law 584 of the Seventy-sixth Congress (1946) and developed and shaped in accordance with that act.
Although closely related to the general educational and cultural exchange activities of the Department of State and, in fact, constituting a large part of them, the Fulbright Program was marked by certain features which, taken together, gave it a distinctive character of its own. When the Program came to be reviewed and appraised, most of these features proved valuable enough not only to be continued but to be extended to all academic or educational exchange activities authorized by the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961. It is, in fact, as the regular academic exchange phase of the Fulbright-Hays Act, supporting "studies, research, instruction and other educational activities" across national boundaries, that the Fulbright Program, under the Board of Foreign Scholarships, continues today.
Thus it is important for the future of the Program to identify its distinguishing features clearly and to determine their essential value. It may also be useful to those who are actively interested in the Program now to explain how certain policies and procedures came about and so document the proceedings of the past for progress in the future. Such interested persons, in a sense, are numbered in the thousands. They include the Board of Foreign Scholarships, many officers of the Department of State and Foreign Service, and numerous workers and volunteers in cooperating agencies, organizations, and institutions. The book may also be of interest to the American academic community in general and to others who are interested in the foreign policy of the United States.
Although singling out the Fulbright Program and focusing our attention on it, we have indicated, whenever relevant, the relationship of this Program to others, referring the reader to sources of information from which he can obtain more detailed information about them. Such information is fairly abundant---much more so than that on the Fulbright Program itself.
To those in other countries who have taken part in this Program we should explain that this book is addressed chiefly to our fellow "Americans" (with apologies to both our Latin American and Canadian neighbors) from a point of view that is inevitably American. Hence our emphasis on the Program as a whole and its operations in the United States. We have not attempted to present it, in its entirety, as it developed in every cooperating country. Instead, in Part Two, we describe certain activities in a few countries, old in the Program, as examples of what was undertaken in many.
We hope, however, that those especially who worked hard in other countries to make the Program a success will gain from the book a deeper perspective with which to appraise the Program on their own terms. It may even prompt them to record how it developed in their own countries, telling the story from the standpoint of their peoples as we have done from the standpoint of our own.
This account is unavoidably personal at times. Both of us were closely associated with the Fulbright Program. These things we saw and part of them we were---to paraphrase the Aeneid. But this book is not officially sponsored nor does it present a point of view that has been officially approved. We call attention in the text and in the "Bibliographical Comment" to points of view other than ours.
Walter Johnson's royalties from it will go to the fellowship program of the Department of History of The University of Chicago and Francis Colligan's will go to the Meridian House Foundation for the Washington International Center, which plays host to numerous visitors from other lands.
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CONTENTS FOREWORD: J. W. Fulbright Part One: LAUNCHING THE PROGRAM
Part Two:
THE PROGRAM
AROUND THE WORLD
Part Three:
THE AMERICAN
PEOPLE AND THE PROGRAM
Part Four:
THE SIGNIFICANCE
OF THE PROGRAM
Appendixes:
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