In June, members of the board of the Fulbright program – the cultural and educational exchange program between the US and other countries – resigned following the Trump administration’s interference. In this personal reflection, UK housing campaigner and past Fulbright Program participant, Glyn Robbins, writes on the program’s work to reduce the barriers to education and academia from working class backgrounds and to promote cultural exchange and collaboration. He argues that moves towards intellectual and cultural isolationism will do the US as much harm as economic isolation. 

The resignation of the Fulbright Board earlier this month, citing political interference by the Trump administration, is the latest development in the turmoil surrounding US higher education. As a two-time Fulbrighter from the UK, and a long-time lover of, and frequent visitor to, the US, I look on this with dismay and concern.

Fulbright and reducing social barriers for academics

With its illustrious alumni (who include Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners), the Fulbright Program, a nearly 80-year-old educational and cultural exchange program, is often perceived as elitist. I am a late-blooming academic from a white, working-class background. Fulbright knew this about me but enabled me to share my lifetime’s working knowledge of housing and urban policy, first with tenants in the Bronx in 2021, and then, with students at Rutgers, Newark, New Jersey in 2024. The fact that I do not come from a “traditional” academic background, and perhaps, am not the “type” of person usually associated with Fulbright, points to an organization genuinely trying to dissolve social barriers.

My semester teaching at Rutgers, in particular, stands as testament to what I regard as the very best traditions of Fulbright and, by extension, the US. My classes were filled with African American and Latinx students from working class backgrounds, some of them second generation immigrants, many of them “first gen” scholars, like me. Few had travelled outside of the US. But together, we exchanged ideas and experiences about a wide range of subjects, from the Royal Family and pie and mash (my home area’s signature dish), to the legacy of trans-Atlantic slavery and the campaign for reparations.

I think back to that time – so recent – and wonder if it would be possible today, not just because of restrictions on visas and funding, but because of creeping institutional fear. One of the most memorable moments of my time at Rutgers was realizing that few in my class had any idea what McCarthyism was, despite getting their meals in the Paul Robeson Campus Center. The chilling effect of some of the measures introduced since January 20^th can only be compared to what happened in the 1950s. But if attempts to erase uncomfortable elements of US history continue, soon, no one will know. George Orwell’s maxim “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past” has rarely been more relevant.

Enlarging access to higher education and promoting collaboration

Coming from the background I do, I have some appreciation of the argument that there may be higher priorities for public spending than higher education, that still only benefit a relatively small number of people. But the answer is to enlarge access, not restrict it. As the first person from my family to have a university-level education, it saddens me greatly to think that, in a couple of generations, we have gone from the idea of higher education as a right, to it reverting to being a privilege. This is true across a range of social policy fields, but undermining organizations like Fulbright will only entrench a return to a time when the only cultural exchange between the US, the UK and other parts of Europe was enjoyed by the “Grand Tours” of the rich.

“Ambassador Johnson Hosts a Reception in” (CC BY-ND 2.0) by usembassylondon

I have met many other Fulbrighters, sharing a similar breadth of knowledge in their fields, some of them, literally, life-saving – people undertaking groundbreaking research into cancer and Parkinson’s disease. But Fulbright has value beyond academic exchange, research collaboration and personal development, although it offers all those things. It provides a genuine cultural meeting-point. I recall being at a reunion event where there were people from at least twenty different countries. I went to my one and only Thanksgiving dinner because of Fulbright! I now know, and count as a friend, the official historian of Manhattan. He took me to Pete McManus’ on 7^th Avenue, one of the few remaining, authentic Irish bars in New York City. I’ve met numerous residents of Penn South, in Chelsea, one of the few remaining limited equity housing co-ops in NYC. Through the organization, I have met a wide range of people I would never have met otherwise. This has deepened my appreciation and understanding of the nation as a whole. I like to think the people I met gained something in return.

I am sometimes surprised to find myself acting as an unpaid ambassador for an organization established partly as an exercise in cultural imperialism, by someone who, in 1956, signed the “Southern Manifesto”, providing covert legitimation to segregation. But perhaps J. William Fulbright is an example that we can continue to live and learn, if we do not close our minds to experiences beyond our own.

Enhancing the US-UK “Special Relationship”

This, sadly, is precisely the intellectual dead-end President Trump is heading down, and trying to take the nation with him. At a very basic level, his promotion of state-sponsored xenophobia is the opposite of what Fulbright stands for, which presumably is why it is under attack. Ultimately, I believe intellectual and cultural isolationism will do the US as much harm as economic isolation.

Fulbright’s role extends beyond the US-UK “special relationship”. But if we are to accept that somewhat contentious sobriquet, let’s consider its fullest meaning. I come from the East End of London, where I like to welcome US visitors for a guided walk around the less tourist-trap parts of the city. I recently took a group of Fulbrighters on the tour. Within a mile, we encountered the birthplace of Samuel Gompers and Abe Beame, the original philanthropic housing of George Peabody, the building where Jack London lived when he wrote “People of the Abyss” and another one that inspired Jane Addams to create Hull House in Chicago, the Bishopsgate Institute, home to an important archive of LGBTQ+ history, and the founding institutions of the East India Company, key perpetrators of the slave trade. The walk started at Liverpool Street station, where there’s a statue to the Kindertransport, the escape route from the Holocaust for about 10,000 children, many of whom made onward journeys to the US. These, indeed, are special relationships, reflecting the good, bad and ugly of our shared history. Attacking the Fulbright Program will not break those links, but it will corrode them.

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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.