Vietnam college named for war critic Fulbright

WASHINGTON -- Decades after he denounced the Vietnam War, a new school in Ho Chi Minh City will be named for U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas.

During a visit Tuesday to the Southeast Asian nation, President Barack Obama pointed to Fulbright University Vietnam as an example of closer ties between the two countries.

The school, which will be Vietnam's first private, independent higher-education institution, is scheduled to open later this year, the White House said.

The U.S. government is helping to pay for the school.

Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1944, William Fulbright -- a former Rhodes Scholar and University of Arkansas president -- promoted international education opportunities throughout his three decades on Capitol Hill.

Days after the end of World War II, he introduced the legislation that became the Fulbright Act.

It advocated that the federal government promote "international goodwill through the exchange of students in the fields of education, culture and science." The Arkansas Democrat proposed selling surplus overseas U.S. government property and using the money to pay for the educational endeavors.

Signed into law by President Harry Truman in 1946, it has funneled billions of dollars over the years into education programs around the globe.

Fulbright also served, for nearly 16 years, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, denouncing the Vietnam War and clashing repeatedly with President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Between 1965 and 1975, more than 58,000 Americans died in the conflict. The number of Vietnamese who perished was far higher.

In 1974, a year before the fall of Saigon and the collapse of the South Vietnam government, Fulbright was soundly defeated, losing in the Democratic primary to Gov. Dale Bumpers.

In 1976, the winners of the Vietnam War changed the name of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City, in honor of the deceased president of North Vietnam.

The Fulbright University traces its roots to the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program, which was begun in Vietnam in 1994.

Initially, the Harvard-affiliated program offered a one-year certificate course, using textbooks and a curriculum developed by the Massachusetts school's Kennedy School of Government, according to an article in Harvard Magazine.

The program, informally called the Fulbright School, now offers graduate degrees. The U.S. government helps to fund its programs.

"Harvard's been playing a catalytic role for the Fulbright School," said David Dapice, an economist with Harvard's Vietnam Program at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.

When the Fulbright School's future was uncertain, the senator's widow, Harriet Fulbright, lobbied on its behalf.

"She wrote a letter and said she felt the senator would be very supportive of what we're doing," Dapice noted.

Joseph Fry, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, said Fulbright "may well have been the most important opponent of the war."

The author of Debating Vietnam: Fulbright, Stennis and Their Senate Hearings, Fry said it "absolutely took courage" to stand against the war at a time when public support for the conflict was strong.

University of Arkansas professor Randall Woods, who wrote Fulbright's biography, said it's fascinating that the new university will bear the senator's name, noting that Fulbright was "an early and vocal critic of the war."

"He argued that the war was not in our national interest, that there was no such thing as a monolithic communist threat, that it was absurd for the U.S. to view Vietnam in the '60s as a tool of Sino-Soviet imperialism because Vietnam and China had been enemies for 1,000 years," Woods said. "Fulbright argued that we should have tried to split Vietnam away from the other communist powers, something that it was possible to do."

For Vietnamese nationalists, "if they were going to name a university for an American ... I couldn't think of a more popular candidate," Woods said.

Metro on 05/25/2016

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