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The Fulbright program was an unprecedented and innovative enterprise that laid the foundations for development of international education in the United States and abroad after World War II. After its inception in 1946, it rapidly became the best-known and largest educational exchange program in the world. This chapter analyzes the experiences and ideas that informed J. William Fulbright’s initial conception of the program as well as the ingenuity of its statutory basis, funding models, and unique organizational architecture. It also looks at the inherent tensions between educational exchange and propaganda and the impacts of partisan and bureaucratic politics on its administration, and it places the program in the larger institutional and political context of the evolution of US public diplomacy during the first two decades of the Cold War.

Tensions between Australia and the US over administration of the Fulbright program soon became apparent in contests over which researchers should be given awards. The US retained control over the decisions within the Board of Foreign Scholarships in Washington and on occasion exerted pressure about the kind of scholars that were wanted. Australian selection committees tended to favour scientists, the US wanted to send humanities and social science scholars as more appropriate interpreters of culture. From these discussions we can see what US cultural diplomacy looked like and what influences were brought to bear.

The Australian Fulbright program began in a period of deepening Cold War tensions. US suspicions of the Australian Labor Party government and Australian negotiators’ suspicions of US cultural diplomacy shaped the negotiations which began as early as 1946. The Australians sought more equality of representation in the administration of the program of educational exchange than the US was initially prepared to allow. After a protracted period of discussions and much delay the Australian Agreement was signed into existence in 1949 with equal representation and better terms than other countries had achieved.

By the early 1960s the original Fulbright Agreement had expired and a new one was negotiated, as a binational agreement with the Australian government providing equal funding. This was signed in 1964, in the context of increasing miliitary intervention in the war in Vietnam by both the US and Australia. Under the ANZUS and SEATO treaties, signed the previous decade, Australia was a keen ally of the US in Vietnam. The Fulbright program and the Australia-US Alliance were pursued simultaneously by the Australian government. Senator Fulbright visited Australia, criticised the Alliance and became a leading dissenter to the Vietnam War. Academics on educational exchange also became active in the anti-war movement.

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.

The Vietnam War posed significant challenges to academics on educational exchange who were expected under the Fulbright program to be ambassadors as well as researchers. The CIA surveillance of the anti-war movement and political interference in the administration of the Fulbright program from government caused academics in both Australia and America to defend the autonomy of the Program. How did scholars interpret the ambassadorial expectation when they were opposed to their government’s foreign policy? Many also found they could not speak critically of their national government without antagonising their hosts. Living up to the Fulbright program’s ideal of achieving ‘mutual understanding’ was very much a matter of learning by experience, to be interpreted by scholars for whom research was actually the priority.

During the Cold War the Fulbright program was considered an effective arm of US ‘soft power’ and cultural diplomacy. The US saw Australia as strategically valuable in the Asia-Pacific region of the world and under the Menzies Liberal Party government, Australia shared the US military and defence agenda. How could the Fulbright program maintain its independence from government interference in the powerful force of Cold War geopolitics? Australia’s Fulbright Board held strongly to the importance of independence and the role of academics to ensure that.

The Australian Fulbright program was implemented after the election of the Menzies’ Liberal Party government. As Australia’s Cold War deepened the Menzies government signed other treaties with the US, establishing the ANZUS Alliance. Administration of the program of educational exchange had to be established amid attempts at political influence and resistance from university staff who still looked to England for prestige and career advancement. The terms of the Australian Fulbright agreement ensured a sound foundation, more autonomy meant the appointment of Australian staff to administer the program and who understood how to reach the Australian university researchers to participate.

A vital aspect of the Fulbright program’s history is showing how the program influenced changes, especially in the development of academic fields. The field of research emphases in awards reveals how tensions between the US and Australia could surface in regard to what might be seen as changing national preoccupations. Australia at first struggled to attract humanities and social science scholars as it was not seen to be very attractive and Americans preferred Europe or countries in Asia. Fulbright awards were nevertheless valuable in developing fields that made Australia the focus of study, e.g. Australian literature.

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.

How did the Fulbright program evolve in relation to the challenge of racial diversity? For the first several decades of the Fulbright program Australia had a mass immigration program and a White Australia policy of racial exclusion. This influenced the fields of research in which Fulbright awards were made. Aboriginal Australians were the objects of research by visiting American scholars but did not themselves begin to win awards until the 1970s. In the mid-1960s many of those who were leading the call for change in immigration laws were Fulbright scholars. Australians travelling to the US on educational exchange observed racial segregation and some became politically active and influenced movements on behalf of Aboriginal people. The first recipient of the Distinguished Visitor Award under the Fulbright program was African-American historian John Hope Franklin. A special category of award for Aboriginal Australians was initiated in 1992.

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 impact of neo-liberalism on the university sector had profound consequences for the Fulbright program’s ability to support academic research. Binationalism had meant the Australian Fulbright program was well-funded by the Australian government even as the US government reduced its contribution in the late 1960s-70s. From the 1980s further cutbacks meant the program had to turn towards private sector and corporate funding for support, involve the alumni and to introduce targeted scholarships. This raised dilemmas about autonomy and freedom from interference that had plagued the Fulbright program throughout its history.

While the ideological inspiration of Woodrow Wilson on American liberal internationalism has been well investigated, less well understood are subsequent influences within the defining ideology of the years of American global ascendancy. Liberal internationalism during the Cold War is often portrayed as a kind of default that arose from idealistic high-mindedness, the novelty of American global experience during World War II, and the bipartisan consensus of sustained anticommunism. However, new scholarship on the career of J. William Fulbright, as well as fresh research on the influence of the Fulbright exchange program overseas, shows the ongoing role of American culture and American political institutions as powerful fashioners of the ideological consensus that defined US foreign policy in these years. These cultural and political influences include a key racial dimension and a prevailing faith in the wisdom of political elites as makers of US foreign policy. Other dimensions of liberal internationalism, including prevailing American gender notions, modernization impulses, and a later critique of American militarism, are evident in Fulbright’s evolving public career, which originated in idealistic support of the United Nations, came to embrace the special mission of the United States in a world of bipolarity, and ended with the senator one of the most vocal critics of a misguided American militarism in Vietnam. The Fulbright exchange program likewise shifted over time in response to many of the same impulses, though, unlike the senator, whose political influence was for long shielded by his electoral invulnerability, it has been vulnerable to shifting political forces both at home and abroad.