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 wonít 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 donít have to mention the prestige, their parentsí 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 Peopleís 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 Calypsoís 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 doesnít ìgo backî. That particular moment in oneís 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 have left 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