The two sides of the former senator exemplify what his biographer, Randall B. Woods, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, calls the “paradox of J. William Fulbright.” And as the United States goes through another period of trying to confront its racist past after the killing of Black men and women by the police and the rise of Black Lives Matter, the U.S. Department of State, which manages the Fulbright Program, has largely been silent on its founder’s problematic civil-rights record.
In fact, the State Department seems to have de-emphasized Fulbright altogether. He’s not named in a history of the program, and he’s absent from public-facing websites for Fulbright scholars and students. (An overview of the program on the State Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs site does touch on the senator’s role, noting that “his segregationist stance and his opposition to racial integration in public places, including in education, are clearly at odds with the ideals of the Fulbright Program.”)
“It feels a little like cancellation,” said Gerardo L. Blanco, an associate professor of educational leadership and higher education at Boston College, and one of the authors of a paper examining the disappearance of Fulbright from the exchange program’s branding.
As American colleges have in recent years grappled with their record on race, debating whether to take down Confederate monuments and remove the names of benefactors with troubling histories from campus buildings, Blanco and others question why there hasn’t been more discussion of what he calls Fulbright’s “painful history” by the flagship exchange program that bears his name. Many in higher education, including Fulbright recipients, aren’t even aware of the senator’s voting record — during a recent lecture Blanco gave to an international-education group, the majority of the audience did not know about Senator Fulbright’s stances on integration, said the scholar, who is also academic director of Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education.
“We need to have public debate,” he said, “and I’m unsettled that we didn’t have that as the international-education community.”