At a ceremony at the Library of Congress last Friday, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Ann Stock congratulated this year’s recipients of the J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding, Bill and Melinda Gates. The Gates’ received the prestigious prize in recognition of their philanthropic work to improve the health, education, and well being of people around the globe, as well as their leadership in inspiring others to practice philanthropy.
Stock noted that the Gates’ humanitarian commitment to the developing world and their unwavering belief that “every person deserves a chance for a productive life” strongly complemented the vision of “people-to-people diplomacy” that the late Senator Fulbright pursued.
Melinda Gates further expanded on this correlation by talking about the “importance of seeing human beings for who they are, not seeing human beings as abstractions from country to country.” She cited Senator Fulbright’s belief that “educational exchange can turn nations into people.” In her own words, she said:
Human contact can challenge our myths, change our minds, and improve our behavior. This is the moral core of the philanthropy that we do, it’s set in these exact same truths. Bill and I believe that all lives have equal value. That means whether if you a child born in Africa, or born in America, your life has the same exact value.
Gates directed another quote from Senator Fulbright to current Fulbright scholars when she said, “It is impermissible not to work for a better future,” and ended her remarks by saying,
Luckily we don’t have to be better human beings to build a better world. We just have to be who we already are – people capable of empathy, who see suffering, want to end it, and then we go out and just do it.
It is this notion of shared responsibility to work for a better future that ties together Senator Fulbright’s vision and the mission of both the Fulbright Program and the Gates Foundation to shape leaders across the globe in the vein of education, innovation, and collaboration in order to solve global problems.
Bill and Melinda Gates richly deserve this recognition by the Fulbright family. The Gates family has made many contributions to world understanding and social justice. But their Gates student exchange program in the UK stands as a shining example of the kind of full funding Fulbright programs should have. The picture of Fulbright program funding has long been diverse to say the least. Money is poured into some countries and squeezed from others while directors do the best they can to keep their programs going.
It is not that the well funded programs do not deserve their funds – they do. But the commitment to the program from the US Government (including Congress) seems to be a general one rather than a pledge to ensure that each and every country with a Fulbright program is properly funded. Tuitions go up, funding goes down and the student program shrinks along with warm feelings for the US.
The Fulbright program is the single most important intercultural asset that the American government and people possess. It has tremendous power to help us make friends in the world and to make the world a better place. It’s time we took a page out of the Gates family book and supported all Fulbright programs fully.