The Fulbright Experience: Nurturing Students' Enthusiasmby Peter Grudin
At a small college like Williams finding the
students who are suited for Fulbright fellowship
is reasonably easy. Although publications run by
students are so crowded with news of the latest
Rugby match that they won't accept my
announcements, the College itself provides many
ways to get the word out: emails to a pre-selected
group of seniors, posters, and mentions in the
calendar of the information meetings I run two or
three times a year. But getting a decent
number of students to attend these sessions is
certainly just a start. They need to learn the
ropes, the application procedures, strategies for
finding the right referees, and a sense of their
chances and or just what the fellowship might do
for them. It is this last question that
demands my attention most. I can talk about how a
Fulbright eases subsequent admission to strong
graduate programs and professional schools. I
don't have to mention the prestige, their
parents' pride, the satisfaction, once
more, of competition and victory that most have
them have sought and harbored, unquestioned, all
of their lives. The one thing that is
hardest to conveyóand that is also
the most important, I thinkóis the
essence of the adventure, the total experience
that these wonderful fellowships endow. To explain
even a bit of this I know only one mode, the
oldest one, the most easily absorbed, the mode in
which our culture is contained at its most
concentrated an primal level: narrative.
During the academic years
1964ó1965, I enjoyed a Fulbright
Fellowship in France. I was in Grenoble, which I
remember as being rather gray and cold, both
climatically and socially. Nevertheless that year
was the most exciting and productive in my life.
Every day was rife with learning. I met people
whom I would not have met in the U.S. those days,
and I made many friends, a Scotsman, a Brahman, an
African American from the mid-west, Senegalese,
Algerians, even that rarest of American settings
back then in the early 60s, a citizen of The
People's Republic of China. Of
course, I learned about France from the inside
and, more significantly, about my own country from
the outside, doing this at a crucial moment in
U.S. history. I learned to question givens up to
then unexamined. The year sharpened my sense of
politics. It also changed my life. So when I
run my annual information sessions on fellowships,
Fulbrighters become the highlight. I hope I inform
the students more than adequately about Rhodes,
Marshall, Luce, Watson, and Truman fellowships,
and many others, but in those cases my ideas are
mildly theoretical. I am attempting to convey an
experience I have never had. When I come to the
Fulbright, however, I see a change come over the
faces of my audience, no doubt consequent to the
one has come over mine. You see, that year I
spent abroad when I was 22 and 23 was the
formative year of my early adulthood. All those
strange mountains and rivers, and the grey stucco
villages of Isere, the Vercours, the Chartreuse,
and then the Alps, the smells and tastes,
patisserie, strong coffee, roasting nuts sold, a
simple tomato salad, the total and abandoned lust
that an expensive menu can provoke, the wines, the
young women dressed with that careful daily
elegance refined from their meager budgets, their
astounding poise in their heels and short skirts,
on mopeds. Then there were the movies,
Belmundo, Jeanne Moreau, actors of whom I knew
nothing, the witty songs and rhymes of Georges
Brassens, things never exported and hardly known
here now, or a John Wayne western subtitled in
French (ìWhy you yellow-bellied
horse-thieving, pusillanimous low-down
skunkî equaled, as it turned out:
ìTu es lache!î and this
provoked me to think more carefully about language
and culture. At the end of that year, I
traveled to Italy and then to Greece, seeing each
of those countries for the very first time. My
time in Greece so closely approached Paradise that
I almost decided never to leave, to accept
CalypsoÃs offer, so to speak, and
abandon all thoughts of home and of what was then
a promising career. It was a moment, a day,
perhaps two or three when I scoured my imagination
to find some rationale for staying, some mode of
subsistence in that country of extravagant
hospitality. What would have become of me? I still
ask myself this. The Greeks cordially forced upon
me the revelation that it was not just a question
of where to live my life, or how. Rather it was a
question of which lifeófor I learned
that I could choose from a number of different
ones óI might choose to
live. That happened forty years ago. I chose
this life, but I lead it transformed and informed
by that year. I am still, obviously nostalgic. I
did go back a few times in the ensuing decade, but
one really doesnÃt ìgo
backî. That particular moment in
oneÃs life, that perspective, that
flexibility is all evanescent. But even
today, once twice a month, I wake up in the
morning remembering a vivid dream. The characters
and scenes of that year abroad, venturing out of
some radical region of my memory, have come alive,
again. I talk to them (in French!), and they talk
to me, often chiding me for leaving them in
the first place, their voices sad and muted with
regret. Their sadness is, of course, my
own. So what does all this mean? Should I
share my sentimentality with my students? Am I
suggesting that other colleges hire me to be
enthusiastic in front of certain audiences? Am I
suggesting that only grateful former Fulbrighters
should advise students about the fellowship?
No. There are more reasonable ways. Bring
back a student who has had a Fulbright, an
enthusiastic one. Find members of your faculty who
have been Fulbrighters. Let them, share their
personal and concrete understandings of the
Fulbright and of the lives from which that gift
allowed them to choose. They will inspire your
audience, and render them stronger applicants, and
render them more contemplative in general. Let
your students learn something about not just what
the Fulbright is, about how to apply, about how to
win one, but through narrative, the profound gifts
latent within that year abroad. Peter
D.Grudin
Assistant Dean
Williams
College
pgrudin@Williams
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