The Fulbright Program, the United States’ premier international-exchange program, celebrated its 75th anniversary with a gala at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C.
The November 2021 event, which was livestreamed around the globe, featured scholars, artists, public officials, and journalists talking about the impact of the program on their lives.
But one person’s name was missing from the festivities: the program’s eponymous J. William Fulbright, the late senator from Arkansas.
Fulbright created the exchange program, which sends Americans abroad and brings students and scholars from more than 160 countries to the United States, as a way to advance international engagement and mutual understanding.
Yet it’s not his only legacy. During his three decades in the U.S. Senate, Fulbright repeatedly voted against civil-rights legislation. In 1956, he signed the Southern Manifesto, which opposed court-ordered integration.
The two sides of the former senator exemplify what his biographer, Randall B. Woods, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, calls the “paradox of J. William Fulbright.” And as the United States goes through another period of trying to confront its racist past after the killing of Black men and women by the police and the rise of Black Lives Matter, the U.S. Department of State, which manages the Fulbright Program, has largely been silent on its founder’s problematic civil-rights record.
In fact, the State Department seems to have de-emphasized Fulbright altogether. He’s not named in a history of the program, and he’s absent from public-facing websites for Fulbright scholars and students. (An overview of the program on the State Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs site does touch on the senator’s role, noting that “his segregationist stance and his opposition to racial integration in public places, including in education, are clearly at odds with the ideals of the Fulbright Program.”)
Fulbright is a window into American views of both race and foreign policy in his time.
“It feels a little like cancellation,” said Gerardo L. Blanco, an associate professor of educational leadership and higher education at Boston College, and one of the authors of a paper examining the disappearance of Fulbright from the exchange program’s branding.
As American colleges have in recent years grappled with their record on race, debating whether to take down Confederate monuments and remove the names of benefactors with troubling histories from campus buildings, Blanco and others question why there hasn’t been more discussion of what he calls Fulbright’s “painful history” by the flagship exchange program that bears his name. Many in higher education, including Fulbright recipients, aren’t even aware of the senator’s voting record — during a recent lecture Blanco gave to an international-education group, the majority of the audience did not know about Senator Fulbright’s stances on integration, said the scholar, who is also academic director of Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education.
“We need to have public debate,” he said, “and I’m unsettled that we didn’t have that as the international-education community.”
Different Fulbrights
Fulbright proposed the exchange program soon after he was elected to the Senate for the first time, in 1944.
With the wounds of World War II still fresh, Fulbright, who had spent three years at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and had served as the University of Arkansas’s youngest president, believed that international academic exchange was the surest way to avoid future conflicts. When people from different cultures live and study together, he said, they come to understand one another. “We must try to expand the boundaries of human wisdom, empathy, and perception, and there is no way of doing that except through education.”
In August 1946, President Harry S. Truman signed the Fulbright Act into law.
Like the exchange program, many of Fulbright’s legislative accomplishments were in the arena of foreign affairs. A longtime chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he had introduced legislation that helped pave the way for the United Nations while he was still in the House of Representatives. As a senator, he was one of the most vocal critics of the war in Vietnam. He was the only senator to vote against Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy’s investigations into alleged Communist influence in the federal government.
If there was Fulbright, the “enlightened internationalist,” there was also Fulbright, the segregationist, said Woods, author of Fulbright: A Biography. During his time in office, he voted against every major civil-rights bill in Congress, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When President John F. Kennedy considered appointing him secretary of state, the NAACP “strenuously” objected, Woods said.
When Woods interviewed Fulbright in the early 1990s, the senator, then in his eighties and long retired from the Senate, said he had taken the positions he did on civil rights because he otherwise would have lost his Senate seat and the backing of white voters in his Southern state who were in favor of segregation. Supporting such policies allowed him to further his progressive foreign-policy aims, he said.
But Woods said such an explanation “lets him off too easily.” Fulbright, he argued, is a window into American views of both race and foreign policy in his time. “People want to know which Fulbright is authentic. They’re all authentic,” he said.
“You can’t escape the paradox. I can’t defend him. I knew him, I interviewed him. Most of the stuff on race came from his own mouth.”
A Disappearing Act
Lonnie R. Johnson, the longtime director of the Fulbright education exchange in Austria, is also working on a history of Fulbright — the program, that is.
Johnson, who retired in 2019, tuned in for the 75th-anniversary gala and recalls being floored that there was no mention of the man behind the program. Even in photographs published as part of the commemoration — of Fulbright standing behind Truman in the White House as he signed the program into law and of Fulbright escorting Jeff Davis Duty Jr., the first disabled Fulbrighter, to classes at the London School of Economics and Political Science — the senator is not identified.
As Johnson shifted his research to focus on the Fulbright Program’s more recent history, he saw that the public presentation of the program began to change in the lead-up to the anniversary. Memos and briefings by an outside consultant to the Fulbright board and a special Fulbright marketing group on a “revised brand narrative” suggested that Gen Z audiences did not respond as well to messages that emphasized the program’s past, Johnson found.
The paper by Blanco and his colleagues — in which they analyzed text and images in the program’s materials and websites, to determine how Fulbright markets itself — also concluded that while it’s “difficult to demonstrate absence,” evidence shows that the program had “begun distancing from the historical figure of the U.S. senator from Arkansas” as early as 2019. They studied a Fulbright “brand guide,” released by the State Department that year that mentions the senator only twice, in an appendix on Page 80.
“It’s the most radical form of historic revision — erasure,” Johnson said. “It’s not just the program got a new history. Its old history was erased in the run-up to the 75th anniversary.”
In a statement to The Chronicle, a State Department spokesperson said that there are many websites with information about the Fulbright Program, which contain different information about the exchanges based on their intended audience. “There is so much different information to share,” the statement said.
The spokesperson added that “while the Fulbright Program is tied, in name, to Senator J. William Fulbright, who introduced legislation to begin the program, it has also grown exponentially in the 77 years it has operated. The Fulbright Program stands on its own merits as the U.S. Department of State’s flagship academic exchange program.”
The spokesperson declined to comment on the senator’s historical legacy.
The program’s 75th anniversary coincided, perhaps uncomfortably, with the sweeping protests in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by white police officers, and a national conversation about racial justice and violence against Black Americans. Johnson said he understood that the State Department might not want to highlight the controversial anti-integrationist past of its signature exchange program’s founder in such an environment, but that public-diplomacy programs such as Fulbright should not be subject to influence by domestic political considerations. “We don’t get to choose our own facts,” he said.
Others in foreign-policy and international-education circles said the decision to de-emphasize Fulbright diminishes his vision for creating the program and overlooks the prestige of the program and his legacy overseas.
It’s not just the program got a new history. Its old history was erased in the run-up to the 75th anniversary.
Sherry Lee Mueller, a practitioner in residence at American University’s School of International Service, got to know the late senator through her work on Fulbright enrichment seminars at the Institute of International Education. She said Fulbright the person was different from his voting record, recalling meetings in which he lingered to shake the hand and take photos with Fulbright students and scholars, regardless of their racial or ethnic background.
“If you erase Fulbright, you miss the fundamental principles for building the program, of reciprocity,” said Mueller, a former president of the Public Diplomacy Council of America. To delete mentions of Fulbright, she said, is to “squander a public-diplomacy asset.”
Woods, his biographer, notes that the Fulbright name continues to hold special meaning overseas. When Americans, including Sens. John McCain and John Kerry, both Vietnam War veterans, helped raise money to start one of Vietnam’s first private, nonprofit colleges, in 2016, they deferred to the Vietnamese to select the name. Their choice: Fulbright University Vietnam.
Discussion, Not Denial
Woods is among many who believe that the State Department, and the broader international-education community, would be better served by an open discussion about Fulbright’s legacy — one that could include whether the scholarship program he founded should continue to bear his name. “I think we have to look at men in their complexity,” Johnson said.
Such public accounting has a precedent. Princeton University decided, in 2020, to strip the name of President Woodrow Wilson, also a noted internationalist, from its public-policy school, because of his views on race. In Britain, there have been debates about whether to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes, seen by many as an architect of apartheid, at Oxford and even whether to take his name off the prestigious Rhodes scholarship, a model for the Fulbright Program. The Rhodes Trust, which administers the scholarship, has been engaged in efforts to “critically engage and respond” to its past.
In fact, the University of Arkansas, where Fulbright was an alumnus, set up a commission of students, administrators, and faculty members in 2020 to reassess Fulbright’s legacy.
The group recommended that the university remove a statue of the former senator from the center of campus and rename the arts-and-sciences college that honors him. But the university system’s board of trustees ultimately decided to keep the statue and the name after the state legislature passed a law forbidding the removal or relocation of monuments on public property, instead directing university leaders to add “contextualization” to the statue.
Even without a public reckoning, many Fulbright alumni of color said they have already been privately grappling with their association with a program that bears his name.
Vern Granger was early in his career in admissions when his boss at North Carolina State University encouraged him to apply for a Fulbright Program for college administrators.
Granger, now director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Connecticut, hesitated. He knew about Fulbright’s civil-rights background from an undergraduate course on historical figures, such as Wilson, with problematic histories regarding race. He calls such considerations the “Black tax,” for the ways in which people of color have to weigh professional opportunities with racial implications. “We have to think about these things while our colleagues don’t,” he said.
He eventually applied and was accepted to the program, which allowed him to spend a month studying Germany’s higher-education system. “It really catapulted me in my career,” he said, “but that didn’t mean I didn’t have conflict.”
People want to know which Fulbright is authentic. They’re all authentic.
Granger said he thinks there should be a debate in international education about Senator Fulbright’s legacy, though he said he can’t say for certain whether the name should remain on the exchange program. “I think it’s acceptable to be torn,” he said.
By contrast, Marisa Lally, a graduate student in higher education at Boston College, said she was not aware of Fulbright’s history on race until midway through a yearlong stint teaching English in Colombia through the program. Lally, whose family emigrated from Thailand, said she and a friend in the program who is Black decided to look up Fulbright one night after wondering “if he was a good guy.”
Like Granger, Lally, who is writing her dissertation on the Fulbright Program, favors a public discussion about the Fulbright name and legacy, but in a broader context, about the purpose of the program. “Rather than focus on the name, let’s focus on what purpose it serves in our society.”
Robin M. Wilson, an adjunct professor of French and English as a second language at University of Detroit Mercy, received a fellowship from the Fulbight-Hays program, another of Fulbright’s namesake academic-exchange programs, administered through the U.S. Department of Education. She studied Afro Brazilian culture last summer.
While Wilson thinks open debate about Fulbright’s legacy is important, she said it is equally important for prestigious exchange programs to do more to expand the diversity of their participants. When she and her fellow scholars, six of whom were of African descent, made public visits, people in Brazil took notice. At one middle school, she said, the students stood and applauded.
“They had not seen anyone from America who looked like us,” Wilson said. “We cannot change the past, but we can change how we do it now. It is important to make space for diverse voices and representation.”
