The Fulbright Difference, 1948-1992

For almost half a century the Fulbright Program of educational exchange has invested in globalism and international understanding, opening possibilities for students and scholars to deepen their disciplines by extended exposure to foreign scholarship, libraries, cultures, and societies. The Fulbright Difference invites 41 of these participants, American and foreign, to probe the nature of their experience in 16 countries. The goal was to go beyond the common assumption that this was a life-changing experience and ask how and why lives were changed. Following an earlier volume of testimonials, The Fulbright Experience, this second volume searches deeper into the experience and explores issues of importance for historians of society, politics, culture, intellect, and diplomacy. It carries as well a potent implied message for administrators of the Fulbright Program and policymakers in all nations. Overall the book provides a harder look at the overseas experience than the usual collection of memoirs. The editors and authors collectively suggest that historians have only begun to understand the Fulbright impact. Among essays depicting five decades of experience are pieces by Leslie Fiedler, Georgie Ann Geyer, Irving Louis Horowitz, Henri Mendras, Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, Richard Robbins, and the principal editor. These are not sentimental reminiscences but strong ethnographic statements, skillfully presented in a critical framework that itself constitutes the first administrative history of the full 50 years of Fulbright to appear in print. The book argues that Fulbright has become a national trust and a global treasure, but that it must be nurtured, both in quality and in size. Today itcovers 125 countries with little constant-dollar growth from the cradle years when it covered no more than a dozen. This book explains rather than celebrates - in Descartes' phrase, it exposes rather than proposes. It will be vital food for those who study international education, and lays the groundwork for further study on the American postwar relationship with the rest of the world. It will remind those who have participated in overseas exchanges how their experience fits into a larger picture, that of the "Fulbright Moment" as one author calls it. It also reminds us that going abroad is beset with dangers as well as opportunities. Above all, it reveals an unusual consensus on the indispensability of the Fulbright Program to the American way of relating to the rest of our interdependent world.