American impressions: being a Fulbrighter
Reflections on my time as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Elon University, North Carolina.
1. Elon University · 2. Flora and fauna · 3. Teaching technology ethics · 4. The sport · 5. Being a Fulbrighter · 6. Life in the North Carolina Piedmont · 7. The national future.
Origin story, 1946: Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright persuades a war-weary Congress to flog its military surplus and invest in an enormous educational exchange scheme. Fulbright is a man of the world, a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford – ‘an overeducated SOB’, Truman laments – and is convinced cultural understanding could help avoid future ruinous conflict. Let’s not do that again, essentially. (Given Fulbright’s empathetic aims, it’s surprising that he becomes an early opponent of civil rights initiatives, for which his name today is somewhat tainted.)
Fulbright’s idea also offers a secondary benefit, unlabelled – the term wasn’t born for five more decades – but surely intuited: increasing US soft power. Surviving a McCarthyist inquisition in the 1950s, the Fulbright programme today sees the United States temporarily swap academics and postgraduate students with nearly fifty nations. It’s selective and prestigious, with alumni including Plath, Friedman, Updike, Glass, and several dozen Nobel and Pulitzer winners. (We’ll gloss over Sunak.) This year I’m part of the British cohort, selected by the US–UK Fulbright Commission to lecture and research in the US as a visiting scholar.
Although I’ve aged out of imposter syndrome I do initially feel outclassed. I don’t have a PhD, nor any real publication history, but my eleven peers are accomplished and intellectually expansive: ophthalmology, fine art, glaciology, linguistics. Privilege and luck has helped get me here. Oxford’s philosophical reputation carries clout – although, thankfully, this strikingly diverse group doesn’t just hail from elite universities – and a Fulbright alum friend has coached me on what the Commission looks for. Candidates who see a Fulbright award solely as a vehicle for personal advancement do not do well. Remember the backstory. This is a project. Academic excellence alone isn’t enough: you need to be eager to embrace the mission, to uphold the ideals of shared values and mutual understanding across borders. To be a Fulbrighter is in part to commit to the ambassadorial bit and act as a minor cultural emissary.
In my first lecture I throw a UK geography pop quiz. Scores are woeful. Students pick out England, London, and Scotland at a push, but the other countries and capitals are a mystery. Even the division between Northern Ireland and the Republic comes as a shock. My one British student, banned from shouting out answers, flares her nostrils in exasperation.
The day before St. David’s Day I wrap up early to foist hwyl cymraeg on my class. Local supermarkets lack key Bara Brith ingredients, but with improvisation and a stroke of luck in sourcing Welsh butter I do okay. I buy a Welsh flag to act as a tablecloth and cue up a stirring eisteddfod rendition of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau while we cut and slather. The students are game for it, bless them, and I’m touched when they ask in a later class when our next cookery date is. I tell them we’ll flip the roles for our final day: now it’s their turn to make and share food that’s culturally important to them. And boy do they understand the assignment. These young Americans may not know where Cardiff is but they sure can cook. Fragrant rice and peas, lavish blueberry granola squares, a gingery lemonade, and banana pudding whose vanilla sweetness lingers still in my memory.
The university community wants my opinion on many things, particularly AI. Can it help us? Is it an existential threat? I’m surprised to find myself prevaricating. I chip in ideas on risks to watch out for and the view from a culture that’s less hostile to regulation, but I suppose the greater your expertise the more you distrust simple answers. And no one likes the gobby outsider who bails before facing the consequences of their opinions; anyone who’s worked with bad consultants knows how that story ends.
Now I’m home, friends ask how America was. Of course these posts are my attempt to figure that out, to unknot my tangled feelings. Maybe it’s easier to talk about how the Fulbright has changed me.
Certainly I feel more rounded, better equipped to discuss my work with people who aren’t technologists. I know more about how a mathematician or a sociologist might think about morality or emerging tech, and I can identify foundations we can build from.
I feel more confident. To live overseas is to suffer a hundred daily microembarrassments: you stand in the wrong line, you mishear an accent, you don’t get the joke. Self-consciousness will eat you alive in this sort of environment, so you might as well outgrow cringing. I’ve learned to simply take control of confusing or awkward situations rather than muddle through in the British style. I’m sorry, I forgot your name. I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I’m sorry, I’m not sorry.
But more than anything I feel older. A previous Fulbright recipient urged me to stay for the whole year, but I’m happy to return to my wife, my cat, and my friends after one semester. It’s not that five months felt like five years at the time, but it feels like I’ve leapfrogged half a decade of my life story. The ubiquitous friction of a new country and new job wears your cells out, sure, but there’s more to it. The side effect of a prestigious role is the pressure to live up to it. I’ll never make the impact more notable Fulbrighters have and will, but the expectations the award implies still induced me to wring each day dry. Yet there was always some nagging guilt I wasn’t doing more, always a concern I was failing my values or neglecting this earnest mission of international understanding.
My time as a Fulbrighter was profound and I’d recommend it gladly, but just before the eager candidate waved goodbye I’d add a final word of advice. Getting involved in something bigger than yourself is a noble, rewarding thing, but have no doubt: it takes its own tolls.
