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Fulbright of the Mind

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By Christopher Phelps

Lately I am feeling like Mole in Kenneth Grahame's childhood classic, The Wind in the Willows. I have been out meandering. Suddenly my nose quivers in the air. My senses come alive with memory. Home!

My family and I are preparing to return to the United States after spending this academic year in Poland on a Fulbright fellowship. We've mailed back a few boxes of books and are earmarking items for Polish acquaintances. We are making mental checklists.

It has been an extraordinary year. Our family life now transpires in two languages. Our preschoolers Rosa, 5, and Nowelly, 6, sing and prattle away in Polish, and Emma, 8, can even write it in fancy cursive. Carol, my wife, studied the language with a tutor every week. All of them would like to stay another year.

All except me. It is time I take my leave.

I invested a great deal in teaching here, as described in my previous column, and I have seen some returns. The faculty members here at the University of Lodz are taking more measures against academic dishonesty, partly as a result of my last column. One of the students I failed last semester, Katarzyna Blazniak, is performing so superbly this spring that she is likely to warrant the top grade possible. Such are the events that sustain a teacher's hope.

In my advanced-level seminar, our discussion veered off the American-studies track one day and switched to the subject of Jews, anti-Semitism, and Polish history. I watched with fascination as it erupted into one of the most candid, revealing, well-argued conversations that I've witnessed this year.

Nevertheless, I am Mole. The sweet scent of America beckons.

I ready to depart with a feeling that Poland has, in some ultimate sense, eluded me. I realized that in April during a talk here by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. I have read Habermas for 20 years, so to see him in person was exhilarating. I gather that his talk was about civic solidarity, rational discourse, and democratic publics, but I cannot say for sure. Nobody could hear him over the chattering of scores of Polish students. That forced me to admit my basic incomprehension of the institutional culture of higher education in Poland. If you cannot remain quiet when the most important living political philosopher in the world is speaking, what is the point of a university?

"About Britain," wrote the Trinidadian critic C.L.R. James in his beautiful book Beyond a Boundary, "I was a strange compound of knowledge and ignorance." That expresses well the apprehension, in both senses, of an intellectual transported to another land. To leave the familiar behind and enter into the foreign (not for a week or two but to live, to work) can be disorienting.

My understanding of Poland remains partial, uncertain, a collection of small insights. Can words convey a country? Have I mentioned the poplars, every branch pointing skywards? The hexagonal concrete blocks in the driveways? The tiny Fiats? The stunning orange egg yolks? The vertically rotating drums in the washing machines?

The coming of spring to Poland was signaled not by Easter bells ringing but by the face of our apartment-building caretaker. The day the rains came, he stopped me in the doorway, palms turned skyward. Then he smiled as if the world had never seen a smile before. No longer must he sweep and sand the walkways, only to find them deep in snow again the next morning. No longer must he crouch in the basement for a bit of warmth while sneaking a smoke. Spring was washing away the ice and snow.

A Fulbright grant, like the changing of seasons, has the appearance of being about environment or geography but is just as much about consciousness. A Fulbright is an experience of the mind. It causes one to rethink oneself and one's country while puzzling out another.

America, if viewed from Europe, is disconcerting today. France's former foreign minister Hubert Vedrine, according to the International Herald Tribune, calls Americans a "nice people" ("peuple attachent," a condescending phrase for childlike primitives), "cut off from the rest of the world," drowned in simplistic media propaganda. Jonathan Steele, writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, considers the United States to be in "dangerous ignorance of the world, a mixture of intellectual isolationism and imperial intervention abroad."

I am inclined to accept those painful criticisms. In the aftermath of American conduct in the Phillippines in 1898, the Harvard philosopher William James said he had the feeling of having lost his country. I experienced an identical feeling when the United States invaded Iraq.

Perhaps we should extend the Fulbright program to Congress. Most senators and representatives have never traveled outside the United States. Most do not have passports. Those facts are unsettling, given the dominance of the United States in world affairs. If our representatives lived and studied abroad for a few months before taking office, it would expose them to the world's complexity. It might humble us.

One of the great surprises to be found in the American past is the personage of Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. A product of the Democratic Party machine in an agrarian Jim Crow state that spent little on education, Senator Fulbright had the cosmopolitan foresight to envision a program to send students and scholars abroad, and to bring international students and scholars to the United States.

It was not immaterial that Senator Fulbright was a former Rhodes scholar and president of the University of Arkansas, but Congress's motivation in 1946-47 was neither cerebral nor pacifist. It was to win the cold war. "We have intellectuals," the Fulbright program said. "America is not a land of yahoos!" Sixty years later, the world still demands proof.

Fulbrighters handle the position of cultural ambassador in various ways. Some treat it as a holiday. Others hesitate to dissent from American policy while abroad. I have taken the approach that the Fulbright is a call to public service, and that the democratic interest is best upheld by free expression.

I accepted every request that I speak. I presented a talk on race and democracy to American-studies departments in Lublin and Krakow. I participated in a panel at a conference of Polish university administrators. I helped the Fulbright program evaluate Polish applicants, and I met with a cluster of State Department officers arriving in Poland.

I spoke on the American elections before a labor meeting organized by some young anarchists, and I wrote about the elections for the magazine Nowy Robotnik (New Worker). That title recalls Robotnik, a bulletin published by left-wing dissident intellectuals in the 1970s who later aided the Solidarity labor union. Today Poland is governed still by ex-Communists (calling themselves social democrats, but in reality neo-liberals) who are so unpopular they will likely be trounced by the Catholic nationalist right in the next election. Many an apparatchik has passed from bureaucrat to capitalist. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

I don't regret a single one of those speaking encounters. My favorite was the labor conference, where I heard construction, streetcar, and textile workers decry corruption, poverty, and unemployment. An employee of the Polish chocolate firm Goplana, founded in 1917 but taken over by Nestle in 1992, explained that Nestle has reduced the company from four factories to one and ceased advertising Goplana products so as to increase the Nestle brand name's market share here. Goplana workers have resorted to buying their own products and promoting them in city squares. (My children are delighted I heard this story. I've let them eat Goplana bars ever since.)

When in Warsaw, I usually pay a courtesy visit to Andrzej Dakowski, the polished executive director of the Polish-U.S. Fulbright Commission. In his office's vestibule hangs a color photograph of the program's namesake. The picture invariably makes me think about Senator Fulbright's foreign-policy evolution in the 1960s, when he emerged as a principled critic of the Vietnam War, warning Americans of the "arrogance of power." What would Senator Fulbright say about our current doctrine of preventive war? I doubt he would mince words.

I assigned my Polish students A People and a Nation, a Houghton Mifflin American-history textbook. In it I find this passage:

"In early 1966 Senator Fulbright held televised public hearings on whether the national interest was being served by pursuing the war. . . . Whether many minds were changed by the Fulbright hearings is hard to say, but they constituted the first in-depth national discussion of the U.S. commitment in Vietnam. They provoked Americans to think about the conflict and the nation's role in it. No longer could anyone doubt that there were deep divisions on Vietnam among public officials, or that two of them, Lyndon Johnson and William Fulbright, had broken completely over the war."

That kind of independent judgment is worthy of emulation at a time when some would once again conflate dissent and treason.

The value of the cultural-exchange program bearing Fulbright's name is simply that it gives scholars a bath in foreign waters. No matter what their discipline or field, no matter what their outlook, that international experience cannot but impress upon them the universality of humanity, the peculiarity of personality, the specificity of nationality, and the limitation of individual comprehension. If that does not make American scholarship more informed, more chastened, what will?

Thank you, Senator Fulbright.