What’s right with America
Senator J. William Fulbright, a drug sniffer dog, and the persistence of US soft power
Much has been made of America’s diminishing power. An over-stretched military, racial tensions blistering its landscape, and the country’s moral authority fading. There is plenty for a foreigner to dislike about the United States and its President right now.
Yet I find myself always rooting for America. And the reason stems back twenty one years.
Early autumn is a scary time for many students. For those graduating from secondary school or college, it’s the end of their old life — with security and certainty — and the start of a new one. An invisible safety net is removed, at once exhilarating and terrifying.
My safety net disappeared in 1996, a few weeks after my 21st birthday, when I left Ireland to do a Master of Engineering degree at Cornell University. I had worked abroad each summer during college, but this time felt different. It was more open-ended and I was nervous.
Packing the night before flying, all of my belongings fitted in one ruck-sack with space left for a cheeky box of Jaffa Cakes and a stash of Lyons teabags. I might be anxious but at least I wouldn’t be without a cuppa.
Or so I thought. When I arrived at Newark Airport, the drug sniffer dog bounded past the baggage carousel and excitedly leapt up on my ruck-sack to identify me to fellow passengers as a covert drug mule. The dog’s heavily-armed master silently scowled as beads of sweat formed on my forehead. Upon questioning, he determined that I was not in fact a cartel sicario posing as a baby-faced, clueless Paddy. I was just a baby-faced, clueless Paddy. They took away my Jaffa Cakes and my teabags.
That was how it started.
The opportunity to study in the United States was my first truly life-altering experience — something that materially changed my future path and perspective.
And it was thanks to a scholarship program called Fulbright.
When I was an undergrad at Trinity in the mid-nineties I really only had one dream: to live and study in the United States.
It was a dream rather than a plan. The best American universities cost more than I could imagine earning in a year. Having never had a personal bank balance with more than three digits, I had no confidence in my future earning potential. The notion of borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to study abroad was obscene.
So it remained a dream until a careers advisor at Trinity called Sean Gannon told me about Fulbright. That was the US government’s flagship scholarship program, which in Ireland offered a handful of grants each year for post-grad studies in the US. There was an application essay and an interview and a lot of fuss and I was immediately put off. Although a decent student and a hard worker, I wasn’t top of my engineering class and figured I had no chance.
Sean insisted though. Someone believing in you more than you believe in yourself is a powerful gift. He walked me through the application form and forced me to do practice interviews, which I hated. After the first one, he noted gently that it could have been better and that I waffled rather a lot. So we practiced again. And again.
I got the Fulbright scholarship — the only one awarded to a Science or Engineering student in Ireland that year. Without it, I could not have accepted my place at Cornell.
And so it came to late August 1996, that scary time of the year when the first leaves turn and students’ lives change.
With the Newark sniffer dog debacle behind me, I traveled by Greyhound to steamy summertime Ithaca. De Mammy would have called it “a grand dry heat,” since in Ireland the difference between dry and wet heat is largely academic when it’s 15°C in August. I should have enjoyed the heat while it lasted because it subsequently snowed for five months straight. Nonetheless, upstate New York provided a glorious, isolated backdrop to my new American life. (“Ithaca is Gorges!”)
The media lens through which Europeans view the US is tinted blue. It was only when I stumbled upon conservative talk radio that I learned with a jolt that everyone did not in fact love Bill Clinton. I discovered Sam Adams — the beer, not the patriot — and fajitas, two lifelong love affairs that continue to this day.
Incidentally, my student card illustrates why I needed three forms of ID to buy Sam Adams at Safeway.
I shared a campus apartment with three other post grads who may as well have been from another planet: a tanned Californian surfer, who said “that’s rad, dude” and in retrospect may have been high much of the time; the son of an Appalachian coal-miner, for whom I would later be best man; and a Chinese PhD student, who studied 24/7 and made the three of us feel guilty. But why study when you could sit on the couch, eat pop-tarts for dinner, drink Sam Adams and watch Michael Jordan’s return for the Bulls?
To these fellow travellers, I must have seemed an equally odd specimen, with my funny accent and floaty hair. One of our early housemate debates was about not dirty dishes but whether our Appalachian friend should keep his guns in the apartment. It was my introduction to Blue and Red State America. There may have been a lesson in there about the rise of China too.
That time at Cornell opened my eyes in ways that changed my life forever and for the better. It was made possible by Fulbright and I will always be grateful.
When I consider America’s place in the world today, I’m reminded of the colossal soft power generated by its openness to foreigners. I hope that openness endures. Twenty one years later and 5,000km away, the United States still has a hold on me — because it invited me to grow up there once.
Fulbright is the U.S. government’s flagship educational exchange program, operating today in 160 countries. It was established in 1946 under legislation introduced by Senator William Fulbright. The application window for 2018 awards is now open — click here for details.
