In 1946, a senator from Arkansas, James William Fulbright, proposed an ambitious idea: Create an educational exchange program to rival the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship in the UK.
“According to his biographers, he found his experience as a Rhodes Scholar so transforming and so, so significant for him,” said Gerardo Blanco, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. As he noted, Fulbright also saw the educational exchange between the US and other countries as a morally sanitary use of money the government made off of selling US military surplus — items you might find in an army or navy store — left across a war-ravaged Europe at the end of World War II.
Fulbright’s more-complicated legacy in the US is overshadowed by his more high-minded goal of creating international dialogue, Blanco explained.
“Part of the challenge is that J. William Fulbright advocated for racial segregation in the United States,” he continued. “At the same time, in the global sphere, he advocated mutual understanding, saying, ‘We don’t necessarily have to like each other, but we should be in dialogue with each other.’ And I think that is very powerful within the Fulbright program.”
Over the past 79 years, the program has awarded over 400,000 scholarships to US and non-US citizens. About half of all Fulbright scholars are Americans heading overseas, and the other half usually come to the US as international students and researchers.
Putting aside the value of this knowledge exchange, there’s a reason why the program is run by the US State Department.
“The most effective programs that I have seen in terms of value to the United States and value to the recipient countries are exchange programs. Fulbright, of course, is one of the premier,” said William Taylor, a former ambassador to Ukraine and who has served as a diplomat across Eastern Europe and the Middle East under the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations.
The former ambassador said programs like Fulbright are a crucial, yet quiet, element of US foreign policy strategy known as “soft power,” with a concept that America can influence the rest of the world on the merit of its values, culture and democratic principles.
When academics come to the US from abroad as Fulbright Scholars, Taylor said, they get to see what the US is really like. And that experience has a long-lasting influence.
“That connection, affects them and when they come to a decision, if they become a member of parliament or as they become a person in business, as they are making decisions, that understanding of the United States and of our culture, of our people and individuals, has an effect, which is in our interest,” he said.
Since the program started, 44 heads of foreign governments have been Fulbright Scholars — at the cost of about $300 million per year.
And the program has found bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.
“It seems like every time you’re in a foreign country and you’re visiting with the cabinet members, half of them are Fulbright Scholars and they’re very, very proud of it,” said Senator John Boozman, a Republican from Fulbright’s home state of Arkansas.
In May, Boozman urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to, not only preserve the Fulbright program, but also strengthen it.
Currently, the State Department’s proposed budget for 2026 would cut spending on exchange programs by 93%. But the squeeze on the program has already been felt by scholars.
In February, the Department of State froze grant funding to current Fulbright recipients, leaving international scholars stranded in the US and American scholarship holders — like Dr. Nicole E. Williams, stuck without money overseas.
“One of my colleagues said, ‘Hey, I didn’t get my second set of funding. Do you know anything about it,’” Williams told WBEZ in April. “None of us knew anything about it. Then, finally, we heard on the news that the funding had been cut.” Williams is a gynecologist from Chicago who was conducting research at a university in Uganda.
As a Fulbright Scholar, her research was supposed to help make pregnancy and childbirth safer for mothers in the area.
And it wasn’t just her grant money that disappeared; America’s soft power footprint was also leaving Uganda.
“You can’t go anywhere without seeing a USAID sign here in Uganda, and many of the places where I’ve been — now it’s all gone,” she said. “The reason why we’re loved so much is because we do this kind of work.”
While the government resumed funding for current Fulbright Scholars, many international scholarship recipients who were supposed to come to the US this year learned in May that their projects were reassessed and rejected by the State Department.
Despite already being approved by the Fulbright program, and after a yearlong application process, Saara Loukola, a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland, got a one-sentence email that said her project was “not compliant” with the US government.
Her Fulbright project was supposed to examine how teachers in the US learn to address racism in the classroom.
Loukola believes the project was declined because it conflicts with a specific Trump administration order to “terminate diversity, equity and inclusion offices, positions and programs in the federal government.”
She is not alone. A recent report by Inside Higher Ed found a pattern of such reassessed and rejected Fulbright projects in other countries: 40% of Norway’s 2025 Fulbright cohort was also cut.
Instead of getting the opportunity to learn from how teachers in a diverse country like the US address racism in schools, Loukola said the State Department’s decision goes against one of the core goals of the program: dialogue.
“That’s one of the principles of academia that we can disagree, and if this opportunity for dialogue is stopped from the beginning, that means it is truly impacting the ways we do research,” she said.
The State Department did not respond to The World’s request for comment.
Former Ambassador William Taylor warned that damage done to the program now could damage US foreign policy down the line.
“That will have a direct effect on our relations over time,” said Taylor. “It will be a cost that we won’t see immediately. It’s hard to measure the effect of any individual exchange program, [as they]are valuable over time.”
Perhaps one measure is just how many more foreign heads of state will be former Fulbright Scholars.
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