In 1925 the 20 year old J. William Fulbright won a Rhodes scholarship which would take him to England to pursue a Master’s degree in political science at Oxford. Fulbright would later cite the culture shock he experienced as a young student, transported from the backwater state of Arkansas to the rarefied atmosphere of Oxford, as a crucial factor in shaping his conviction about the importance of humanizing international relations, and “turning nations into people.” Only by penetrating beyond abstract notions of ideology and interacting on a personal level could people understand that other countries are populated “not by doctrines that we fear, but by people with the same capacity for pleasure and pain, for cruelty and kindness, as the people we were brought up with in our own countries.” Fulbright’s immersion in the groves of academe at Oxford also awakened in him a thirst for knowledge and an intellectual curiosity he had not previously known; “I was ashamed of my ignorance and lack of knowledge of literature and other things,” he said, “and I began to read just to learn.”
These two independent beliefs, about the need for humanizing international relations and about the pursuit of knowledge as a value in itself, have been central to the Fulbright program throughout its 70 year history. Yet when Fulbright in 1946 introduced the legislation that would become the Fulbright program, there was little in it that would alert an isolationist Congress to the bill’s lofty, internationalist objectives; the bill was simply presented as “Amendment to the Surplus Property Act of 1944,” and its purpose was to designate the U.S. Department of State as the disposal agency for surplus property outside the continental United States, and more specifically to convert credit from unsaleable military military materiel into a fund for international educational exchange. It was a perfect example of “beating swords into plowshares,” and the bill cleared subcommittee and floor action with little scrutiny; Fulbright had avoided calling attention to controversial aspects of the bill, and also made sure that only a handful of Senators were present and that it be adopted without a vote under the unanimous consent procedure. After its approval, Senator McKellar of Tennessee had told Fulbright that had he known the implications of the legislation, he would have voted against it: “Young man, that’s a very dangerous piece of legislation. You’re going to take our young boys and girls over there and expose them to those foreign’isms.” Which is exactly what Fulbright had in mind.
During his long career as an elected official, first as Congressman and then as a U.S. Senator and Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright was a remarkably outspoken critic of what he felt was the imperious self-righteousness of U.S. foreign policy, and later of the Vietnam war. As a junior Congressman, he authored the “Fulbright Resolution”, which declared that Congress favored “the creation of appropriate international machinery with power adequate to establish and to maintain a just and lasting peace, among the nations of the world, and as favoring participation by the United States therein through its constitutional processes.” This “international machinery” Fulbright was advocating in 1943, materialized two years later in the form of the United Nations.
The exchange program Fulbright created in 1946 was yet further evidence of his fervent internationalism and belief in “learning to see the world as others see it,” yet this largesse of empathy and understanding for other nations did not extend to his fellow Americans of African descent. Sadly, Fulbright’s voting record on civil rights is not what we would expect from a progressive, visionary internationalist, but rather that of a segregationist Southern Democrat from Arkansas, which he also was. In 1956 he signed the Southern Manifesto, opposing racial integration in public places. He did not challenge Arkansas governor Orval Faubus’ when Faubus sought to block desegregation at Little Rock Central High in 1957, and he voted against civil rights legislation even as late as 1964-65, in contrast to other liberal lawmakers. His deplorable civil rights record was almost certainly a contributing factor to his ultimately not being appointed Secretary of State by President Kennedy.
To his credit, Fulbright helped desegregate the University of Arkansas Law School, was one of only six Southern senators to support the nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the US Supreme Court, voted in favor of re-extending the Voting Rights Act in 1970, and took a leading role in blocking Nixon’s nomination of the racist Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. In later years he argued that his positions on race and rights were a matter of political expediency – a necessity for getting re-elected by his Arkansas constituents. He was not, by all accounts, a vitriolic racist or demagogue, but there is today general agreement, even among his most ardent admirers, that his civil rights record was less than honorable, and indeed his tragic flaw.
During the summer of 2020 Black students at University of Arkansas, tweeting under the #BlackatUARK hashtag, demanded the removal of a statue of Fulbright, which they felt was a reminder of, and symbolic of, a broader history of racism at the university. A committee of students, faculty, staff, and alumni was formed to consider the complaints and to make recommendations on how best to deal with what spiralled into a contentious issue and bitter dispute. The university decided ultimately to not remove the statue, but to contextualize it with a plaque and website providing a more complete picture of Fulbright, with a more balanced account of both his failures and accomplishments.
Fulbright biographer Randall Bennett Woods, endorsing the removal of the statue, argued persuasively: “Anything that makes students of color feel demeaned, or disrespected, has no place on this college campus or any other college campus. But there is the other legacy. The task before us, it seems to me, is how to repudiate the segregationist legacy while preserving the enlightened internationalist legacy.“
“The Fulbright Agreement between the United States of America and Norway was signed and entered into force on May 25th, 1949 in Oslo. Norway was the 11th nation to sign a Fulbright agreement with the United States, and since the start of the program some 1,700 Americans and 4,600 Norwegians have been awarded a Fulbright grant to study or conduct research in the Norway and the U.S. respectively.
As U.S. proceeds from surplus property began to diminish, the need for binational financing of the program increased; the Fulbright-Hays act of 1961 authorized the President to “to seek the agreement of the other governments concerned to cooperate and assist, including making use of funds placed in special accounts … in furtherance of the purposes of this Act…” On March 16, 1964, the United States and Norway signed an amendment to the original agreement that provided for binational financing of the program through the two nations’ annual budgets. (see more about the history of the program at:http://eca.state.gov/fulbright/about-fulbright/history/early-years)
While the program was originally supported exclusively by American funding, today approximately 70% of its funding comes from the Norwegian government, primarily from the Ministry of Education and Research, with the remainder coming from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United States Department of State.
Each year, approx. 40 Norwegians receive grants to study, teach or conduct research in the US, and approx. 25 Americans receive grants to do the same in Norway.
The Fulbright Program in Norway works closely with cooperating agencies in the selection, supervision and administration of particular grantee categories: The Institute of International Education (IIE) manages the graduate students program and the the scholars program. The United States Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs oversees the program worldwide.
The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (FSB), a 12-member presidentially-appointed body, provides policy guidance for the entire Fulbright program. It operates through the U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC.
The Commission of the US-Norway Fulbright Foundation is located in Oslo. It has a staff of four and is responsible for the daily management of the Fulbright Program in Norway, which includes both Norwegian grantees going to the US and American grantees coming to Norway.
The work of the Commission is supervised by a Board of Directors, comprising four Norwegian and four American members. The Norwegian and American members are appointed respectively by the Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs and the U.S. Ambassador to Norway, who are ex-officio Honorary Co-chairs of the Board. The Board normally meets four times per year, oversees and adjusts the direction of the program, and makes the final selections of the Norwegian and American grantees.
“Of all the examples in recent history of beating swords into plowshares, of having some benefit come to humanity out of the destruction of war, I think that this program in its results will be among the most preeminent.”
– President John F. Kennedy in remarks at the ceremonies
marking the fifteenth anniversary of the
Fulbright Program, August 1, 1961 .
For in-depth information about the history of the Fulbright program and the dual legacy of JW Fulbright, please see Lonnie Johnson’s two-part article “Fulbright, Arkansas, and the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Fulbright Program, 1946–2021.” Part I can be accessed here and Part II here.