John Bader is the executive director of the Fulbright Association, a global alumni association of participants of the largest US exchange program in the world. He tells The PIE about why this program offers hope, and how it commands cross-party support in Congress.
The PIE: For any of our readers who are not completely familiar with the Fulbright program, could give us a little condensed history?
John Bader: Sure I’m happy to do that. The Fulbright Program was established in 1946 in the ashes of the Second World War. Senator Bill Fulbright from Arkansas, on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford’s Pembroke College, that experience so inspiring that years later when he was a US senator, he [wondered] what could we do to make the world a better place and more peaceful.
His contribution to that thinking was that we could all own in our own way [contribute to] diplomacy. By getting to know each other as people were much less likely to kill each other.
“Any given moment there are something like 7,000-8,000 Fulbrighters across the planet”
And he felt that it was really important to deliberately build relationships and networks of friends across the planet.
The PIE: He sounds like a very insightful person.
JB: He devised this international exchange program that has now grown from a handful of countries to 165 countries across the world.
The PIE: How many countries are involved and how many people are involved?
JB: So now at any given moment there are something like 7,000-8,000 Fulbrighters across the planet who are studying, teaching or doing research. It has also included lots of experts on a variety of topics from law to nuclear energy.
The PIE: And do you have to be nominated to be able to participate or can you just apply yourself for a Fulbright scholarship?
JB: You can apply yourself. Each country has its own rules and its own procedures. The application process is a little complicated because it involves to two countries: the country you’re coming from and the one you’re going to, but it’s designed to be very inclusive to recruit people of all kinds of different perspectives, ethnicities, backgrounds in order for it to be truly representative and to work as a diplomatic program.
The PIE: And is it very reciprocal? As in the same number of foreign nationals would take part as the number of Americans?
Yes. Almost one to one. In fact, there are more slightly more international grantees than Americans.
The PIE: Were you a Fulbright Scholar?
JB: I was in the Fulbright student program. I was graduating from Yale College. The story of my Fulbright is that I was sitting in a movie theatre in 1982. I’m watching the film Gandhi And I remember thinking to myself as an arrogant young man, very self-satisfied to be in Yale and thinking I knew everything, clearly I did not, because I was looking at the screen and thinking I don’t know this story at all.
At that moment I sort of re-engineered my education, I started finding opportunities to learn more about India, and eventually, the opportunity to apply for a grant was there.
My father had been a Fulbright scholar in Germany. In fact, he was in the first class of students to Germany. My parents got married while he was on that Fulbright. And [later] my dad worked for Bill Fulbright in the Senate in the 1960s! To cap it all, my mother was the senator’s portrait artist.
The PIE: Some compelling reasons to work for Fulbright! And what your role is then running the Fulbright Association?
“It’s an amazing community, a very talented engaged group of interesting internationalists”
JB: Yes, so the association is an independent non-profit. We are the alumni organisation of US grantees. We don’t run the program. We work with those people of course but mostly our job is to unify and then sort of activate the alumni community, once they’re done with their grant.
The PIE: And what do you like most about the job?. You obviously meet a lot of people who have so many different experiences.
JB: Yeah it’s a great job for a lot of reasons, one of which you just pointed out. It’s an amazing community, a very talented engaged group of interesting internationalists. That resonates for me and the life I’ve led.
I also say that it’s a challenge running this organisation. It’s a small non-profit. We have to raise money, we have to find members.
We have to build great programming, and it’s a complicated job because there are lots of different kinds of stakeholders. We have a political piece to the work we do which is exciting but complicated and you know that it’s not a big organisation in terms of staff. We are just six staff.
The PIE: Wow, and you have 60 chapters I think?
JB: We have 54 chapters, in 38 states and all of them run by volunteers. So the staff tries to support all that great work. We have hundreds of volunteer leaders across the country that organize events and conversations and all kinds of wonderful community-building activities.
The PIE: Has it become more difficult in the last few years in terms of political climate and Fulbright, do you think?
JB: Well yes and no. Yes in that this particular administration has proposed deep and destructive cuts to the Fulbright Program. The three budgets that they have proposed: the first one at a 47% cut, the next one a 71% cut, the most recent a 54% cut. If these cuts were actually enacted they would destroy the program, it would be the end of it, I mean you can’t cut something in half and expect it to survive.
So yes in that it’s challenging. No in that we’ve got people from both parties on both sides of the Hill that are very supportive of what we do. Our approach has always been bipartisan which is unusual I guess in this environment. But our champions fall in both camps. And we choose that deliberately.
“This particular administration has proposed deep and destructive cuts to the Fulbright Program”
The PIE: And what will happen – I mean, eventually will a budget be put forward that is approved?
JB: The president’s budget -and this long predates the current administration – has generally been a kind of political statement rather than a practical roadmap. It talks about their priorities without necessarily connecting it to the reality of the political system in the United States.
The US Congress is the ultimate authority on money. Only the Congress can appropriate funds from the US Treasury and therefore they pass appropriations bills that the president has to sign.
It can’t go without a presidential signature, but in those appropriations bills, it is outlined what will actually be spent. So, in this case, the House and Senate appropriators have generally for the last eight to 10 years proposed flat funding for the Fulbright Program.
The PIE: Flat funding for Fulbright?
JB: It’s actually its own line item, so it’s not buried somewhere else. It’s in a bill that affects the US State Department; in fact, that funds the State Department.
And that’s been flat for a while, which is challenging because of course you know that means the buying power continues to decline. But [Congress] has generally resisted or even just ignored what this administration proposes.
The PIE: Okay I see. So that’s good.
JB: Yes it is. It is good, it’s reaffirming. By training, I’m a congressional scholar and I’m a professor, I’ve written on Congress and so on. It’s often very hard to remember good things happening on Capitol Hill. I mean anything you read about Congress, its inability to make decisions on gun control or infrastructure or anything, it’s a mess.
But if you peel that away there’s a lot going on that actually is positive.
The PIE: Okay. And I wonder whether you could give me an example of what Fulbright can achieve and its impact on people’s lives and careers?
JB: Thirty-two heads of state have been Fulbrighters. There are currently eight heads of state who are Fulbrighters.
The PIE: That suggests that the admissions process is definitely being well run, if notable applicants are then going on to such success…
JB: Absolutely, and there are many minister-level folks. We have three current members of Congress who are Fulbrighters. But those are the fancy people – those are the people that we’re proud of and we honour. But it’s really the ordinary that is more important.
Some time ago I met a group of students, most of them from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, and Tunisia. These were all Fulbrighters, who were at the time studying at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, Georgia, there to take engineering courses and earn engineering degrees.
These are people whose countries can’t always offer the kind of training that in this case was being offered at Georgia Tech. To empower these young people to go back to their countries and continue to build them… I mean training civil engineers here in the United States so they can go back to Pakistan and build infrastructure.
That’s what Fulbright is about – it is giving people the resources to strengthen their communities, to build their countries and to build this network of friendships.
“If you’re just recruiting students from Oxford you are really messing it up”
The PIE: How do you ensure that all around the world non-Americans are aware of the opportunities?
JB: Yeah that’s always an ongoing challenge is in order for this to work, you have to have a strong recruitment process. You really have to have really great outreach and so on and I give a lot of credit to the Fulbright commissions that are in 49 of the 165 countries [in which Fulbright operates].
Those folks are constantly on the prowl for great talent in their countries as well as diverse talent. If you’re just recruiting students from Oxford you are really messing it up because okay, smart people go to Oxford. But that’s not England, that’s not [the whole of] great Britain.
They do a lot of outreach here in the US too… The folks who are charged with this reach out to historically black colleges. They reach out to community colleges. They try to be sure that every state is represented not just Connecticut or Massachusetts. Because otherwise, it misses the mark.
