State Department to impose Trump agenda on scholarships

The transfer of 12 international scholarship programmes from the all-but-defunct United States Department of Education (DoE) to the Department of State (State) is set to increase ideological control over what disciplinary areas receive funding, affecting both Americans studying outside the US and international scholars entering the country.

The 12 programmes include four from the Fulbright-Hays programme – a component of the well-known Fulbright Program – such as the F-H Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, as well as eight other programmes, including the Business and International Education Program and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship.

The DoE’s press release of 18 November, couched in bureaucratic language, says the move “leverages the State Department’s global reach and international education and public diplomacy expertise to advance US national security and America’s foreign policy priorities”.

The website of the Fulbright-Hays programme explains that grants are “to individual US K-14 pre-teachers, teachers and administrators, pre-doctoral students and postdoctoral faculty, as well as to US institutions and organisations. The programme supports research and training efforts overseas, which focus on non-Western foreign languages and area studies”.

However, the fact sheet published at the same time lists five grant abstracts from the Fulbright-Hays programme as exemplars of what will no longer be approved; though the fact sheet does not reference any of the executive orders made by President Donald J Trump after returning to power in late January, they are clearly informed by the ethos of the orders that banned diversity, equity and inclusion from federally funded activities and stripped LGBTQ and trans people of protections in federally funded activities and regulated industries.

The fact sheet lists an award of US$37,000 to a doctoral student for a dissertation “on the relation between collective movement, like boxing, walking, and dancing, and systemic conditions of anti-trans violence” in Bogotá, Colombia’s red-light district, and Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park as an example of a project that would not be funded.

Another award that exemplifies what the US administration does not want studied is one that provided US$27,000 to a doctoral student “to investigate non-binary and trans francophones’ linguistic attitudes and ideologies toward inclusive French [for example, non-binary pronouns] in Montréal, Canada”.

These limitations, Rachel Rinaldo, a sociology professor and director of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado (Boulder), told University World News: “are in line with what we’ve already seen from the Trump administration’s executive orders, so it’s no surprise that they would include them in the memo”.

Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms managing director of the US Free Expression Programs (PEN America), strongly criticised the transfer of the scholarships to the Department of State.

“The transfer of international education and foreign language programmes from the Department of Education to State comes on the heels of some of these vital programmes already being cancelled this academic year,” he said.

“It also appears [to be] part of the administration’s broader playbook of trying to impose total ideological control over academia, threatening funding to force compliance.

“For decades, federal government funding has been vital in helping to train future diplomats and experts with deep knowledge of diverse cultures and societies. In the long run, undermining the academic freedom of students and scholars in these crucial programmes will be detrimental to their effectiveness.”

While he could not rule out that it has happened before, Michael S Roth, president of Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut), told University World News: “I can’t remember another administration describing the kind of grants that have been given out by previous administrations that would no longer be funded.

“This is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to coordinate across the various branches of the government ideological preferences over the mission-specific agendas of the departments in question, and that would be the case in deciding to review vaccine policies because of the ideological proclivities of Robert Kennedy Jr or deciding that some Fulbrights that were completed in the past were not worth funding: now all funding would be in accord with the ‘President's priorities’.”

Roth said the phrase “this grant is no longer in accord with the President's priorities” is now seen often. “And that's … really extraordinary.”

“What I worry about is that people have gotten used to that, and by coordinating the Fulbright programmes under State, it gives the administration a greater opportunity to use ideological witness tests for what should not be ideological programmes. And that, I think, should concern everybody,” said Roth.

Cosmopolitan dimension

Since the establishment of the main Fulbright programme in 1946, named for its congressional sponsor, the late Senator J William Fulbright, more than 380,000 “Fulbrighters” from 160 countries have received funds to either study in the US or, if Americans, to study or work in education elsewhere in the world.

Last year, roughly 1,900 US students, 4,000 foreign students, 1,200 US scholars, and 900 visiting scholars received awards, in addition to several hundred teachers and professionals, according to the programme’s webpage. Thousands of other scholars and students have received funding from the 12 programmes being relocated to State.

“The Fulbright provides the opportunity, especially for young scholars, to bring their American education and stress test it in a different cultural environment, whether it’s Madagascar, southern France or in South America,” said Roth.

“I use the word stress test because [of] what happens when you're in another context … You discover things about yourself and your own education that help you continue to learn.”

While Americans on Fulbrights are not icons of the country, Roth said, you are seen as someone who is a product of the American educational system; indeed, one of the questions on the application is: “Will you be a good representative of your country wherever you go?”

The programme has “allowed us to send some of our really bright young scholars and teachers into places in the world where they, I think, improve the reputation of the United States, and at the same time, they return home with a different perspective on the world, because it’s informed by the culture of the country they were in. For a pretty modest investment of US resources, I think it did a lot of good for individuals and for our country’s reputation,” said Roth.

Roth explained what Fulbright scholars from other countries bring to campuses like his in Middletown, Connecticut.

“The great thing about the people coming to our campus from outside is they bring their own values. We don’t want them mimicking whoever is the US president. You don’t want them trying to distort their own perspective. You want them to bring their values here so we can learn from them.

“At Wesleyan, I’ve seen people who are coming to work on history or a foreign language, or in other areas of the university, who come with a very different perspective on education, politics and daily life – it’s informed by their own background and institution.

“The Fulbright is an effective way of bringing, often younger, scholars to our campus who are filled with energy and ambition and add kind of another cosmopolitan dimension to the culture of the campus,” said Roth.

One such recipient of a Fulbright is Pavlo Fedorchenko-Kutuev, a sociologist in Ukraine who for more than a decade taught sociology at the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (and with whom this author team-taught two courses on the sociology of war).

Courtesy of a Fulbright fellowship, Fedorchencko-Kutuev spent the 2002 academic year as a senior fellow doing research at the Robert Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University (NYU).

Fedorchencko-Kutuev told University World News: “I’m interested in the comparative historical political sociology of the modern nation state, its birth, its rise, its evolution and its potential demise, or at least its falling into crisis.”

His research project was a comparison of bureaucratic cultures in the United States and Ukraine using American bureaucracy as a kind of ideal against which Ukrainian bureaucracy and state institutions had to be compared.

Fedorchencko-Kutuev recalled that studying at NYU was an unparalleled experience. It had “everything you needed, like research facilities, library computer facilities, faculty and … the advantage of being in New York City [with] lots of other educational and research and cultural institutions. I was lucky to take advantage of The New School for Social Research and Columbia University” (both of which are in Manhattan).

“Washington DC is not far away and neither is Boston. So I could crisscross to these cities, visiting colleagues, giving talks, attending lectures, seminars, exchanging ideas, tapping into that stream of ideas and scholarship which is extremely vibrant at American universities”.

Fedorchencko-Kutuev also spoke about New York City’s Fulbrighters’ community.

“The Fulbright office helped us form a close-knit community of Fulbrighters based in New York City. There were quite a few of us from different countries … They organised events for us or arranged for us to attend concerts, talks and conferences,” he said.

Today, as Ukraine must rely on the US for its very survival, and as US politics under Trump has taken an authoritarian turn, I asked how his experience studying there two decades ago informs his understanding of the US.

He replied that living there had given him a “more subtle, more nuanced understanding of the country. You realise that it’s extremely diverse, vivacious, culturally heterogeneous, so extremely complex and sometimes fragile, despite appearing as this mighty Leviathan or mighty behemoth.”

Resignation of Fulbright board

Concern about American international programmes becoming one more victim of Trump’s drive to reshape the ideology of American higher education was telegraphed last June when 11 of 12 members of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board resigned, charging political interference in the awarding of fellowships.

In a statement posted on Substack on 11 June, the resignees wrote, “The current administration has usurped the authority of the Board and denied Fulbright awards to a substantial number of individuals who were selected for the 2025 to 2026 academic year.

“The administration is also currently subjecting an additional 1,200 foreign Fulbright recipients to an unauthorised review process and could reject more. We believe these actions not only contradict the statute but are antithetical to the Fulbright mission and the values, including free speech and academic freedom, that Congress specified in the statute,” that established the first Fulbright.

The statement further said, “We have raised these legal issues and our strong objections with senior administration officials on multiple occasions, including in writing. The officials have refused to acknowledge or respond to the Board, failing to even attempt good faith efforts to course correct and operate the Programme in accordance with the statute.”

In a statement shared with National Public Radio (NPR) on 12 June, the State Department described the board members as “partisan political appointees” of former president Joe Biden and said their claim that the 1961 Act “affords exclusive and final say over Fulbright applications to the board is false” – even though at the time, as NPR reported, the policy brief on the Department of State’s website said that the act entrusted to the board the “final responsibility for the choice of all participants in educational exchange programmes".

A statement from the Department of State told NPR: “It’s ridiculous to believe that these members would continue to have [the] final say over the application process, especially when it comes to determining academic suitability and alignment with President Trump's Executive Orders.”

For her part, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told NPR: “President Trump, not the Fulbright Board, was elected by the American people to ensure all foreign policy initiatives align with our national interests."

The resignees’ letter did not mention Darren Beattie, who back in March had been acting undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department, which later in the year appointed him the senior bureau official at the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the division responsible for the main Fulbright programme (and now the 12 other programmes).

In 2018, during the first Trump Administration, Beattie was fired from his position as speechwriter for attending a gathering of white supremacists. His appointment to the State Department so concerned the Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee that they wrote in protest to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Beattie’s “white nationalist loyalties and public glorification of our adversaries’ authoritarian systems make him unqualified to serve,” the Democrats wrote.

He “persistently traffics in white nationalist ideology that is hostile to Jewish Americans, women, and people of colour. The Anti-Defamation League [of B’nai Brith] . . . has highlighted his long history of involvement with ‘notorious racists, antisemites, and white supremacists … Beattie has advocated on X for starkly racist and fascist social policies, arguing that “low-IQ, low impulse control populations lack higher reasoning and moral faculties [and, therefore] require corporal punishment and the threat of violence to function properly in society”.

He has also advocated for the sterilisation of ‘feral populations’ and lamented the absence of population reduction policies because ‘all I see is trash multiplying’,” said the letter.

The representatives’ letter goes on to voice concerns about Beattie’s admiration of “China’s and Russia’s authoritarian systems and repressive policies as [being] superior to American democracy”.

According to the website the Raw Story, when the 11 members of the Fulbright board resigned in June, some 200 scholarships that had already been awarded to US researchers had been cancelled (presumably by Beattie) “purely on the administration’s ideological objections to research topics”.

That 1,200 scholarships that had already been awarded were placed under review sent “shockwaves through the international academic community and damaging America’s reputation for world-class research,” the Raw Story writes.

‘Tool of censorship’

Concern about the impact on America’s reputation was shared by Alana Deluty, president of the Rhode Island chapter of the Fulbright Association, who told Bloomberg News: “The fact that we’re alienating the smartest, most accomplished people in the world, who would normally be flocking to the US – it’s a huge loss for this country.”

Effenus Henderson, co-director of the Washington State-based Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion, wrote on LinkedIn that political appointees at the State Department were turning a “programme built to foster critical inquiry and global cooperation” into a “tool of censorship” by flagging projects using phrases like “critical theory”, “refugees with disabilities”, or even for noting that “boys and girls have different perspectives on climate change”.

“This is not about national security or fiscal prudence. It is about erasing intellectual work that challenges dominant narratives,” he wrote.