Fulbright Women in the Global Intellectual Elite

Since 1946, the Fulbright program has offered women opportunities to expand their horizons and engage with the global intellectual elite. In turn, they have contributed a great deal to the exchange program, as participants, administrators, and accompanying spouses of grantees. This chapter explores the history of women in the Fulbright program, chronicling their achievements across each of these roles, and highlighting case studies of remarkable Fulbright women throughout the program’s history.

The Limits of Liberal Internationalism

This chapter addresses how Fulbright’s views on race complicated American exchange programs with African nations in the 1960s. At the height of the civil rights movement, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson sought to improve relations with newly decolonized African nations, and Fulbright’s influence over exchange programs complicated that pursuit. Though Fulbright believed that boosting mutual understanding through exchange was the world’s best hope for creating and maintaining peace, he did not believe that all people—not least Africans—would be able to grasp the liberal, Western ideals he wished to spread. Though he was known as a racial moderate, his outlook on policy was hemmed in by the color line at home and abroad, a fact that constrained the US government’s African exchange programming. He preferred that the focus of exchange programs remain on Europe.

Tactful Visitor, Scientific Observer, or 100 Percent Patriot?

The meaning of ambassadorship within the Fulbright program has been difficult to define over its seventy-year history. In the Australian Fulbright program, scholars had to negotiate a complex interplay of expectation, experience, and programmed planning. Age, gender, and discipline influenced their various responses to and recasting of the program’s ambassadorial dimensions.

The Meaning of Educational Exchange

This chapter examines Fulbright’s theories of cultural exchange to understand the substance and assumptions of his commitment to liberal internationalism. It shows that his assumption that educational exchange would produce mutual understanding was underscored by his assumption that the United States embodied universal liberal values. Therefore, Fulbright presumed that a program of exchange would produce an expanding sphere of American influence. This assumption was a product of deeper currents in his philosophy of international relations: his ideology of national exceptionalism, his faith in the transformative power of American culture, his idealist belief that war was the product of misunderstanding, and his confidence in the power that flowed from American economic and political preponderance.