Gish: In defense of Fulbright
Valley Voices
Courtesy photo
Last month, I spent an evening with Vail Mountain School’s graduating class as the alumni speaker at their Class Night. I shared a story with them that I hoped would prove helpful on the eve of their graduation from high school, one that was about redemption, resilience, and humor.
It was a story about my first week as a teacher in the Czech Republic, where I served for one year as a Fulbright English teaching assistant at a small agricultural high school in Southern Moravia.
It was, as I shared with the graduating class, the most pivotal year of my life. I’ve watched in horror as the Fulbright program’s future has seemed increasingly perilous under President Donald Trump’s administration. Funding freezes in March stranded grantees abroad. In May, the Trump Administration submitted a discretionary budget for the 2026 fiscal year that would slash funding for Educational and Cultural Exchanges, the umbrella under which Fulbright falls, by 93%.
A week ago, all 12 members of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board resigned, explaining in a statement that the Trump Administration’s budget cuts and unlawful political interference have corrupted the integrity of the Fulbright program so severely that maintaining their posts would be an unthinkable endorsement of those actions.
As a Fulbright English teaching assistant, I lived a simple, beautiful life. I taught English classes. I helped with wine harvests in the local fields. I bought books for the school with a small stipend I received from the Fulbright Commission. I rode my small borrowed bicycle around the countryside. I was paid the starting wage of a Czech teacher.
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I do not know if I approve of the decision of the board to resign completely. We all know what happens in a power vacuum. But then, I also cannot condone the perversion — and financial upheaval — of the Fulbright program by the current administration. The outgoing members of the Fulbright board have made clear, however, that they will not be pawns in a twisted display of political violence.
I do not take it for granted that I was embraced by a foreign country while mine turns foreigners away, issuing travel bans, turning away asylum seekers at the southern border, and instituting mass deportations, sending National Guard troops and Marines marching through the streets of Los Angeles, and teargassing its own constituents.
The Trump Administration has made clear what its values are. Rubber bullets over books, fearmongering over scholarship. The members of the Class of 2025 will graduate from college, if they so choose, in 2029. If our democracy is as staunch as I hope it is, there will be a new administration in office. The class of 2025 will have elected that individual in the fall semester of their senior year.
It is my sincere hope that at some point in their young adult lives, our valley’s recent graduates will have the opportunity to apply for a Fulbright. Until that day, it is up to us to examine our values and fight for them every day.
