Academic Ambassadors, Pacific Allies: Australia, America and the Fulbright Program by Alice Garner and Diane Kirkby (review)

The Fulbright Program’s origins were, as Alice Garner and Diane Kirkby argue, in the “short-lived burst of liberal internationalist optimism” after World War II. It developed, however, through very different times. In 1946, Democrat Senator J. William Fulbright proposed that war debts to the United States might be defrayed in the joint funding of educational exchanges to “bring a little more knowledge … and … compassion into world affairs.” Following China, Burma, the Philippines and Greece, Australia signed up in 1949 to a scheme that, since then, has supported over 5,000 scholars from the USA and Australia. Over those decades, Garner and Kirkby show, the program navigated shifting emphases in the purposes “mutual understanding” might serve, and in higher education’s role amid “broader social and political change.” Meticulously tracking institutional and policy dimensions, the authors also give particular emphasis to awardees’ experiences. Published in Manchester’s Key Studies in Diplomacy series, Academic Ambassadors makes a fresh contribution to understanding the personalised, lived aspects of transnationalism.

Garner and Kirkby draw out the differences as well as shared purposes the USA and Australia brought to the program from the start. There were imbalances in profile (the Fulbright “brand” had a power in the USA lacking in Australia), in funding (reflecting the strains of Australia’s sterling loyalties in dealing with the mighty dollar) and alignment (the philanthropic–corporate associations of the US program were absent in Australia, at least until business sponsorship was considered amid funding cuts in the 1980s). Alert to “top-down” influence, especially during the Cold War, the authors insist that the middle layers of management, consultation, selection and adjustment often mattered more. A “complex interplay of forces” generated a part-principled, part-pragmatic, part-procedural resistance to overt politicisation. Funding under the US Information and Educational Exchange Act (the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act) was “an explicit element of Cold War foreign policy.” Fulbright exchanges, by contrast, tested the extent to which higher education could become central to Cold War political culture without necessarily becoming an instrument of Cold War politics.

In those processes, education had its own distinct role. Australia, for example, seemed to favour sending scientists, reflecting perceptions of the relative local weakness of the social sciences and a greater trust in the “full and fair picture” ostensibly apolitical applicants might provide their hosts. That Australian candidates could be described as “chaps” indicates the deeply cultured, gendered terms of their selection – a dimension that is a strong focus of this book. For its part, in seeking “goodwill,” the USA favoured “the … kind of extrovert” judged more likely to be found among political scientists and historians. These calculations became more complicated when scientists organised in questioning the Vietnam War, and when American visitors could scarcely conceal their shock at Australian attitudes to immigrants. The scrutiny of the “personal qualities” and “emotional stability” of “worthy” men and women became more exacting amid concerns about how effectively the program was achieving a goal eluding clear definition. Even within the Australian government, portfolios wrangled over whether the program’s primary focus was cultural diplomacy or educational exchange.

Australian higher education itself was changing, the Fulbright reflecting if not facilitating departures from British models and networks and broadening areas including library and information management, health and social work, technical, primary and secondary education. Applications for Fulbright funding might reveal unquestioned assumptions, as in identifying indigenous Australians as “material for study,” but also sharpen an appreciation of the applications of expertise.

It is, however, the personalised dimension of these processes that is most powerfully captured in the book. In 1958, Fulbright sent Bill Ford to study economics at the University of California. There he developed close relationships with civil rights campaigners, demonstrating a solidarity with them during court proceedings, which was unprecedented among their local white supporters. Ford later encouraged the organisers of the 1965 Freedom Ride from the University of Sydney...