Save the Fulbrights

WITH ITS talent for doing just the wrong thing, or at least avoiding the right one, the U.S. State Department has decided to follow the latest trend in American higher education-right over the nearest cliff. This time it’s the prevalent tendency to substitute quantity for quality, the number of students that can be enrolled rather than what they learn or how long they stay.

Here’s the latest whiz-bang brainstorm out of Foggy Bottom’s masterminds: Increase the number of Fulbright Fellowships awarded every year for international study by cutting the time each scholar spends in a foreign country. That is, hack it to pieces.

For the gruesome details, see Sarah Wire’s story on the front page of Monday’s paper. (“Obama wants to cut Fulbright program/Alumni mobilize worldwide to avert trimming exchanges created by Arkansan”) The worst part of this news isn’t that the budget for the program is to be cut-by 13 percent-but how: by shortening the duration of the Fulbright Fellowships so more and more of the recipients will have less and less time to study abroad.

The change would seem to sum up today’s approach to higher education, which keeps getting lower and lower.

Why, sure, who says a student might need up to a year to absorb the whole language and culture of a foreign country, or explain ours to foreigners? Efficiency über alles. This latest bright idea out of State is the educational equivalent of Speed Reading, which used to be a fad, too. The formerly funny Woody Allen had one of his characters sum up how that wondrous new approach to reading worked (or didn’t) by saying, “I’ve just read War and Peace. It’s about Russia.”

Why shouldn’t the same superficial approach be just as effective when applied to study abroad? Call it the equivalent of one of those hurly-burly trips offered by travel agencies that ought to be called Vacations in a Minute. (“Seven countries in eight days!”)

After the State Department is through with the Fulbright Program, it should be disimproved beyond recognition. Our striped-pants brigade has a well-established reputation for presiding over a devastation and calling it success. Just look around at its works from Benghazi to points east (the usual muddle in the Middle East, Iran’s coming Bomb, and an ever Greater Russia) to see the results of our diplomatic corps’ not so fine hand. Now the Fulbright Program is to get the same treatment, a mix of indifference and more active forms of malice.

And now State is opening a new front in its war on quality and coherence in American foreign policy. Doubtless it can count on strong support, or at least slick rationalizations, from our current president. For not since Jimmy Carter has the country had a chief executive so accustomed to presiding over disasters-and aggravating them.

THIS LATEST assault on quality, this time in higher education, may not prove as significant a failure as some of the administration’s other Signature Accomplishments, whether in American health care or foreign policy in general. But this major reform of the Fulbright Program, the effect of which is to deform it, is of particular interest here in Arkansas.

Why’s that? Because it bears the name of the prominent senator from Arkansas who designed it as a twin of the Marshall Plan. And it was just as effective in its way. It helped stave off Communist ideology around the world by offering real education instead, just as the Marshall Plan would make European economies strong enough to resist that era’s Tide of the (totalitarian) Future. Both worked well, thanks to the determination of a president like Harry Truman and a strategic thinker like George Kennan at State-long before he became just another angry old white man.

Back then, even J. William Fulbright was an internationalist. It was only when the freedom of non-Europeans was at stake (like the Vietnamese) that Bill Fulbright let his racial preferences show, as he did almost throughout his career by his stand on civil rights, or rather against them.

In the end, Senator Fulbright would have no more sympathy for the oppressed here at home than he did for the captive nations of eastern Europe, whom he always did consider a bother. Much as this president seems to regard Russian aggression in Crimea and the rest of Ukraine as just an impediment to his grand Reset of Russo-American relations. (Reset is the latest term of art for what used to be called Détente in Henry Kissinger’s time and, before that, appeasement in Neville Chamberlain’s. The euphemisms change, but not the disastrous results.)

It was only a matter of time before today’s State Department would start mucking about with the Fulbright fellowships, too. As always, it can offer a glib rationale for its bumbling. To quote one of its PR types, Susan Pittman, “It’s just a matter of getting more people in [the program] in order to be able to have the experience of an exchange program.”

Right. The way the Arkansas Lottery provides more college scholarships to more students so they can get right into (and right out of) our colleges and universities without overdue attention to how long they stay there or how much they learn while they’re still there.

Who says Arkansas-or the U.S. State Department-isn’t on what is invariably called the “cutting edge” of education at our flagship universities? The important thing is how many bodies can be enrolled, and how much in tuition fees they pay to keep so many of our big-name universities so overstaffed with administrators, and their faculties so full of adjuncts and teaching assistants-who come a lot cheaper than real professors and scholars.

SO WHY not cheapen the Fulbrights, too? Yes, the fellowships used to support leading American writers of diverse talent and inclinations (from Steinbeck to Updike) and leading American thinkers and artists (think Milton Friedman and Aaron Copland), but the important thing today is just to get more bodies through the revolving door that the program is now to become.

What’s so important about investing so much time in studying a foreign language and culture, anyway? Christopher Kelley answered that question in Monday’s paper. He was a Fulbright Fellow in Ukraine and Moldova who’s now an associate professor at the University of Arkansas’ law school on its Fayetteville campus. He put it this way: “It takes time to learn how to be an ambassador in another country. You can’t just parachute in, look around, and parachute out.”

Can the Fulbrights-the original, real fellowships-be saved from the State Department’s disimprovements at this late point?

Yes, if all of us, in Arkansas and far beyond, will speak out in their defense. One of Arkansas’ senators, John Boozman, sounded optimistic the other day: “The consensus is that this program is very well-respected” and “at the end of the day . . . will probably get level funding and continue on as it is now . . . .”

But then there’s the other senator from Arkansas, Mark Pryor, who sounds as wobbly, and as inarticulate, on this issue as he is in general. (“The Fulbright scholar program is a very prestigious program. . . . However . . . I understand that in today’s tough budget climate many of our programs may face cuts.”) And so indecisively on. When your core political conviction is compromise, you may wind up with no core convictions to compromise. You just go with the flow, the way our State Department is going with today’s flood of mediocrity in education-and in so many other things.

That sound you hear in the not so far distance? Ignore it. It’s just the same old cataract that awaits down this same old muddy, meandering river.