For the past two weeks I have been having a glance down memory lane, helping to select the people who, with the help of a Fulbright scholarship award, will be given an academic year in America, as I was exactly 50 years ago.
What is so different now, of course, is that any of these bright people could simply get on a plane with a visa waiver and go to the United States; way back in the early 1950s you needed a plausible reason for going and, as now, the authorities needed to know you were not going to blow up the country – a brilliant ex-pupil of my father's, for instance, who had been a hero of the Resistance fighting on the same side as the Americans in France, was denied entry because he had once been too left wing – possibly even a Communist!
For a whole generation the Fulbright was vital, not just for the award but as a way to get to America at all. And if we owe a lot to Senator Fulbright, we can thank the method by which the Harkness scholarships, on which he came to Britain, selected its scholars. That's how he got the idea. They were chosen not nationally but state by state, so – as he himself said – he didn't have to be among the most clever people in the United States, just the most clever in Arkansas.
I wonder, if Scotland secedes from Great Britain, will they adopt such a method for these awards?
What do you think? Have you say below
