Last February, I had coffee with a young American, let’s call him Andy, best friend of a friend‘s son, who was spending a semester abroad in Berlin. We chatted about his university program that entailed moving with his whole class of international students to a new city abroad each semester while pursuing a Bachelor degree. We immediately connected although two generations lie between us. What we share is the experience of participating in academic exchange, what it means to adjust to a new culture and to maneuver a language not one’s own. We connected via a friend whom I had met during my time at the University of Michigan more than three decades ago. We promised each other to meet again.
Last week Andy and three of his friends, students from Sweden, Canada and England, all enrolled in the same program, spent a sunny afternoon on the terrace of our house in Berlin. They had been exploring the birthplace of Alexander von Humboldt on a Sunday hike. The students had just handed in their final projects covering a wide range of interests such as sustainable community banking, gaming and A.I., solar fusion and statistics, and the impact of lightning on different shapes. They were excited about returning to their university’s home base in the U.S. for their project presentations and the graduation ceremony. All of them enthusiastically confessed their desire to return to Berlin or Europe at some point. One of the lessons they drew from their international program was that they felt prepared to adjust to any new culture. I have confidence that this generation will contribute significantly to solving humanity’s problems such as climate change, poverty and inequality.
Turning away from international exchange
The story could end here with these young people making plans and looking optimistically towards their future. All of them are planning to pursue an M.A. degree, one of them even a PhD. But the Swedish student just got the extension of his student visa for the U.S. denied, though he is trying again with the help of his university. He will still be able to graduate, but he might miss out on personally attending the last few weeks of his program and graduation. Andy and his friends are beginning to understand that studies for international students might not be possible in the U.S. due to the restrictive policies of the current administration. Foreign students are not regarded as an enrichment and are no longer welcomed with open arms.
This is an astounding development. U.S. universities depend on foreign students‘ paying full tuition. They have been recruiting thousands of them every year. Now academic institutions advise their foreign students not to leave the U.S. during their studies because re-entry might be denied. Even worse, hundreds of foreign student visas have been cancelled. Students are ordered to leave the country, or are detained, for practicing what the U.S. government has been promoting at home and abroad for decades: freedom of speech and an exchange of ideas.
But foreign students are not just an economic asset. They enrich academic programs by adding new perspectives and taking their experience back to their homelands. Friendships are formed for life across borders and cultures: a win-win situation for both the guest and home country.
Instead of waiting for the end of the academic year and under the pretense of a temporary review of government-funded exchange programs, the U.S. State Department has frozen funding for scholarships overnight since February. Students and scholars participating in this year’s exchange programs worldwide have been left in limbo. As woub.org, the online home for WOUB Public Media, reports, this affects State Department administered programs such as Fulbright, Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, which helps lower-income students study or intern overseas; the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program for experienced foreign professionals to study in the U.S.; and the Mandela Washington Fellowship that provides funds for young African leaders for academic and leadership training in the U.S.
The vision of a Senator from Arkansas
As an alumna of the Fulbright program, I experienced first-hand the advantages and possibilities such programs have to offer especially to young people with limited means. Had it not been for the generosity of the Federation of German American Clubs and a Fulbright travel grant, I would not have been able to study at a small, private college in Florida for an academic year as an undergraduate student of a state university in Germany.
After the destructions of World War II, Senator J. William Fulbright (1905-1995) understood the power of educational exchange to bring about mutual understanding and peaceful cooperation in order to prevent future wars. President Harry S. Truman signed the Fulbright Act into law on August 1,1946, and more than 400,000 alumni later, the Fulbright Commission would be celebrating its enormous success and 80th anniversary next year. But the program might not make it.
The Washington Post is reporting on an internal government memo outlining a 50% cut of the U.S. State Department‘s budget. This will not only affect humanitarian assistance, global health and international organizations such as the United Nations and NATO. It will also mean the end of all cultural programs and exchange programs the State Department funds, among them the highly successful Fulbright program:
“Under the proposed budget described in the memo, which remains subject to deliberations within the administration and, crucially, on Capitol Hill, USAID is assumed to have become fully a part of the State Department. Humanitarian assistance would face cuts of 54 percent, while global health funding would fall by 55 percent, the memo says.
There would be particularly steep cuts to support for international organizations, with just under 90 percent of this funding eliminated in the proposal. Funding for the United Nations, NATO and 20 other organizations would be ended, the memo states, while targeted contributions to a handful of organizations, including the International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Civil Aviation Authority, would remain. The memo also describes a total cut in funding for international peacekeeping missions, citing’“recent mission failures’ without providing details.“
With humanitarian aid and peacekeeping missions on the chopping block, cultural funding seems less important, maybe even worth giving up in favor of actually saving lives, combatting illness and poverty on the ground. But the 2026 budget proposal, which needs to go through Congress for approval, is not an “either/or.” It is an effort to use remaining funds without budgetary restraints and for ideological and short-term purposes to build political pressure. Which begs the question, to what end? This plan is the opposite of long term, patient trust building and mutual understanding. It is part of increasing efforts to bring academic institutions to heel.
These proposed cuts would leave crucial partners of the Fulbright program that is administered by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) in the cold (you can click on that link but, like many other government sites, the ECA website is offline – courtesy of DOGE). While major funding comes from an appropriation by the U.S. Congress annually, numerous non-profit and private organizations as well as foreign governments in 49 countries supplement funding. Non-governmental organizations serve as implementing partners. The Fulbright Program exists in 160 countries. In about 50 countries, bilateral Fulbright commissions run their exchange programs with the United States. In more than 100 countries, the U.S. embassies administer the bilateral exchanges.
Fulbright – A success story
As the Fulbright Commission’s website states (it is still online), since 1946, more than 400,000 Fulbrighters from over 155 countries have participated in the Fulbright Program. Among them are 62 Nobel laureates such as Joseph Stiglitz who went to the U.K. as a student in 1969 and received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001; or Peter Higgs, United Kingdom, who was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of North Carolina in 1965 and received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Journalist Maria Ressa, a Fulbright graduate student fellow at the University of the Philippines in 1986, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her life-long fight against corruption in the Philippines, for safeguarding freedom of speech and to hold power to account.
Leading cultural figures are among the Fulbright alumni such as writer John Steinbeck,Fulbright Specialist to the Soviet Union in 1963, who received the 1940 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and became Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1962. Rita Dove, poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate, was a Fulbright Student in Germany in 1974. She won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The composer Aron Copeland who received the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1945 participated in several scholarly exchanges as part of the Fulbright specialist program: He was a Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom in 1961, Japan in 1962, Germany in 1963-64, Austria in 1964, and Italy in 1964.
The list goes on and on and even includes 40 heads of state, but it is the numerous students that returned to teach, work in their communities, run cultural and social projects, run tests in labs and help build stable democratic institutions that make the difference around the globe. Among them are graduates and faculty of non-elite, community colleges and state universities and from lower income families like myself. It is a record worth celebrating, but online documents are being disappeared or changed on U.S. government websites. In today’s America, internationalism is seen as threatening and isolationism seems to be the trajectory the U.S. is on.
The Fulbright program has experienced difficult times over its almost eight decades of history, with cuts demanded by Democrat as well as Republican administrations. In 2019, the Trump administration singled out the program as well, but along with other exchange programs it survived. Back then, alumnus Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, former Member of the German Parliament, Vice-President of the European Parliament and currently German Ambassador in Moscow, remarked: “I believe the network of Fulbright scholars around the world is what sustains sometimes difficult relations between nations, because Fulbright scholars know that there is more to America than current political troubles or this or that conflict. It goes much deeper.“
Keeping our end of the bargain
Even young, ambitious students like Andy and his friends who are privileged to attend an international college program will face obstacles in a world less open than the one their parents and grandparents experienced. Those who cannot afford studies abroad and rely on programs such as Fulbright might not even be able to imagine going abroad in the pursuit of knowledge about their field and the world.
The world will certainly be poorer for the loss of cultural and educational exchange. The U.S. as a leading nation in scientific research and cultural exchange will suffer. Who will suffer most are American students and scholars. Their world will become smaller, their experience more limited and provincial. We all will be poorer for it, less safe, less inspired, less healthy because the exchange of ideas and serious research will be hampered.
Let‘s hope members of Congress will grow a spine and reclaim the power of the purse in support of an open, democratic, rule-based world order. The legacy of Senator Fulbright and with him some 400,000 alumni are standing behind them in spirit. But should U.S. politicians be willing to sacrifice academic freedom and mobility, we should keep our end of the bargain. The more current and future U.S. students will get the chance to study abroad, the more the seed of a just and value-based international order will be planted. Let’s keep funding them so they can view their own country from a distance and experience foreign cultures to build bridges in the future.
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Notes
https://abcnews.go.com/US/foreign-college-students-targeted-deportation-rights/story?id=120262362
https://www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_Fulbright.htm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/14/state-department-budget-cuts-trump-rubio
https://www.fulbrightprogram.org/
https://www.fulbright.org.ph/index.php/maria-ressa-fulbright-1986
https://www.dw.com/en/fulbright-exchange-program-battles-white-house-antipathy/a-43008933
