Fulbright Act Of 1946 Summary

Fulbright Act of 1946. President Truman signed the bill into law on August 1, 1946. Among the provisions, a Board of Foreign Scholarships was established to oversee the program. The Board included ten members representing foreign policy and higher education sectors. According to the initial act, American students from a range of academic disciplines were to apply for the merit-based scholarships providing financing for a year of graduate work abroad. The preference was given to qualified war veterans. Non-governmental organizations, like the Institute of International Education, fulfilled administrative functions of the selection process. When it came to the administering the program overseas, binational commissions were set up abroad to oversee

According to the National Research Council (1976), it passed two years before all the parts of an operating program fell into place and the first award recipients were selected (p. 2). The Fulbright agreement with China was signed on November 10, 1947; an agreement with Burma, on December 22. Agreements with the Philippines and Greece were signed in March and April of 1948. By the end of 1948, agreements were also signed with New Zealand, Belgium/Luxemburg, Italy, and the United Kingdom (p. 6). Then began the solicitation of grant applications and the selection of recipients.
The Fulbright-Hays Act. In 1961, the original legislation of the Fulbright Act of 1946 was replaced by the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act consolidating several international activities funded by the federal government, greatly expanding the scope of Fulbright exchanges. Its preamble also articulately restated the “principles of liberal internationalism,” a statement of which was missing in the initial Fulbright Act (Johnson, 2014, p. 6). Given that the war surplus had been exhausted, the legislation also authorized new sources of government funding.
According to Dubois (1995), other changes