Fulbright Program's 70th Anniversary Celebrated at University of Arkansas

Photo Submitted

Lonnie R. Johnson, Director of Fulbright Austria. Petra Spiola, photographer.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas, the University Libraries, and the Arkansas State Chapter of the Fulbright Association will celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Fulbright Program with a lecture titled “Philosophy, Politics, Money, and Memory: The Fulbright Program at Seventy, 1946-2016” by Lonnie R. Johnson, executive director of Fulbright Austria.

The free public lecture will be at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 2, in the Helen Robson Walton Reading Room of Mullins Library.

On Aug. 1, 1946, President Harry Truman signed Sen. J. William Fulbright’s legislation into law, dedicated to mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries. The Fulbright Program soon became the best known and largest academic exchange program in the world.

Today approximately 8,000 Fulbright grants are awarded annually to some 1,600 U.S. students, 4,000 foreign students, 1,200 U.S. scholars, and 900 visiting scholars, in addition to several hundred teachers and professionals. In the 70 years since its inception, the program has involved more than 370,000 Fulbright recipients from 165 countries, and among those recipients are 54 Nobel Laureates and 33 heads of state.

The Department of State, on its website, praises the Fulbright Program as “the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government.”

Given the established reputation of the program, there is a tendency to take it for granted or to assume that its development has been without problems. That isn’t the case, and Johnson’s talk will take a look at the ups and downs in the history of the Fulbright Program over seven decades: how it initially was institutionalized and has survived episodes of political conflict, institutional gerrymandering, and budget struggles to date.

Lonnie R. Johnson, a native of Minnesota and graduate of St. John’s University, studied abroad in Vienna as an undergraduate and then studied philosophy and history at the University of Vienna. He has more than thirty-five years of administrative experience in international education.

Based in Vienna, he has been the executive director of the Fulbright Commission in Austria since 1997, a binational organization responsible for managing the Fulbright exchanges for students and scholars between Austria and the United States.

He has served as the chair of the 25-member Conference of Fulbright Program Executive Directors in Europe twice and was instrumental in initiating the grassroots www.SaveFulbright.org platform in March 2014 that was established as a successful protest to a proposed $30 million budget cut in the Fulbright Program. His recent research has focused on the institutional history of the Fulbright Program.

About the University of Arkansas: The University of Arkansas provides an internationally competitive education for undergraduate and graduate students in more than 200 academic programs. The university contributes new knowledge, economic development, basic and applied research, and creative activity while also providing service to academic and professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the University of Arkansas among only 2 percent of universities in America that have the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the University of Arkansas among its top American public research universities. Founded in 1871, the University of Arkansas comprises 10 colleges and schools and maintains a low student-to-faculty ratio that promotes personal attention and close mentoring.