In
a cramped office in the Arts and Sciences Building, Assistant
Professor of Languages and Literature Maryanne Heidemann is finishing
the semester, getting ready to take a group of students to Germany
and trying to explain the impact receiving two Fulbright Foundation
grants has had on her teaching.
“Once you’ve experienced other cultures,
you can almost not help but be enthusiastic,” Heidemann
says. “It’s ansteckend…what’s the word
in English? It’s infectious, that enthusiasm, that interest
in the world.”
Heidemann was in Germany in 1990, the year of
German reunification after the Berlin Wall fell. Heidemann believed
that she had to be there, to be involved and find out what was
happening, so she applied for a Fulbright grant. That is what
motivates many Fulbright scholars—the hunger to be involved
in events of the world, to gain a first-hand knowledge of it and
then pass it on to those they teach.
Foreign travel is perhaps not the first teaching
resource that comes to mind when people think about Ferris State
and its career-oriented mission. But the Ferris Fulbrighters,
a dedicated group of globetrotting faculty, have been bringing
a more universal perspective to their teaching thanks to legislation
sponsored by the late Sen. J. William Fulbright.
Building Bridges
At the end of World War II, Fulbright saw the
need to establish a program to encourage international understanding.
His legislation establishing the Fulbright Program passed the
senate in 1946, with its first participants going overseas in
1948 funded by war reparations and foreign loan repayments. Now,
more than 140 countries participate in the program, sending Americans
overseas and bringing natives of other countries to the U.S.
During the Cold War period and immediately after,
Eastern Europe was an area of keen interest for Fulbrighters.
Professor of Languages and Literature John Jablonski has personal
experience with the Fulbright’s role in helping open the
former Soviet bloc to outside influence.
Jablonski worked at the U.S. embassy in Budapest
as a cultural affairs officer from 1984-87. “I was the sole
American there responsible for the Fulbright program of eight
exchanges and watched those exchanges grow to 48 by the time I
left in 1987,” he says.
Jablonski returned to Hungary last year to teach
an assortment of classes from American Culture to Technical Writing
and also to delve into the works of László Országh,
who developed the bi-lingual Hungarian and English dictionary.
“He was a man of courage because he undertook
the study of English and American studies and rebuilt the department
in which I worked when such studies were officially, at the very
best, unpopular,” Jablonski says.
Shifting
Sands of Time
The geo-political climate has undergone a major
shift with the end of the Cold War, and that seems to be reflected
in the areas Fulbright scholars want to visit—at least if
Ferris is any indication.
While Jablonski was in Debrecen, Biology Professor
Olukemi Adewusi was halfway across the globe in Namibia performing
AIDS-related research, and Languages and Literature Professor
Phillip Middleton received a Fulbright lectureship to Syria.
A Syrian bazaar today is much the same as it
was 1,000 years ago. Glass blowers at brick furnaces, oranges,
apricots, figs and almonds heaped onto carts and stalls filled
with fresh hummus, baba ghanouge and shish kebab permeate marketplaces
with extraordinary smells. This is a part of the world that many
Westerners view as exotic—and at least a little frightening.
But Middleton is no stranger to this remarkable region.
“My first job after finishing school was
in Libya,” Middleton explains. “I taught linguistics
at what was then Al-Fateh University. I had a huge amount to learn
in terms of culture and language. This trip will be much easier,
I’m sure.”
A large part of the reason Middleton is traveling
to Syria is that very immersion in culture and language such a
place causes.
“If I would go to someplace like Morocco,
I’d have French to fall back on,” Middleton says,
“I really wanted to go someplace where I’d have to
speak Arabic.”
In
addition to having an interest in cultures that are at the forefront
of world politics, Middleton also embodies traits common to virtually
all Fulbrighters—being a willing host for the travel bug
and having an unbelievable desire to learn. He’s looking
forward to visiting Jordan and Lebanon, where he’s never
been and to re-visiting Turkey.
“To understand another culture takes a
long time. You bring back the knowledge that you’re not
going to learn everything about a country or culture, but you
can bring back a better understanding,” says Middleton.
The Travel Bug is Ansteckend
The Fulbright program also helps recent graduates,
postgraduates and developing professionals.
Wendy Highland (EHS’99) was studying at
Ferris when she received a Fulbright to Poland. Applying for the
grant was the result of the infectious enthusiasm of her professors.
She began at Ferris as a vocational education student before finding
her niche.
“One of the voc-ed people suggested that
I go do something in the Languages and Literature department,
because I belonged with the rest of the weirdos over there,”
says Highland with a smile.
She was graduating with a B.S. in English Education
when Jablonski mentioned the Fulbright program to her. Highland’s
successful application took her and her 15-year-old daughter to
Opole, Poland, for a year in 1999-2000.
Highland saw the lingering effects of communism
in the personalities of the people. “You can see the hardship
in the slope of their shoulders as if they carry an invisible
weight,” she says.
Despite the difficulties they face from years
of communist rule and the struggle to transform a scarred nation,
the people of Poland take great pride in their country.
“A professor and his family took us to
the mountains during the winter,” recalls Highland. “We
hiked five hours to the top of this mountain. We came around a
corner, and the Earth just seemed to drop away. The sun was shining
on the snow, and it just seemed symbolic of the entire trip. They
were very proud of themselves, proud of their country, proud that
they were able to share that experience.”
Knitting
the Globe Together One Fulbrighter at a Time
Fulbright scholars are united in what they feel
they bring back from their travels—a broader cultural perspective
and an ability to place their various studies into a more global
context. Language and Literature Professor Phillip Sterling has
paid tribute to this aspect of the Fulbright experience by compiling
the anthology Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange
published earlier this year by Mammoth Books. Imported Breads’
contributors have all traveled, studied and lectured throughout
the world on Fulbright grants.
“The literary interest in diversity and
multiculturalism usually lies with writers who come to the United
States from other cultures,” says Sterling. “The anthology
is unusual in that the writers are all Americans who have lived
in other countries and brought something back with them.”
The title comes from Sterling’s observation
that of all the things countries trade with each other, bread
is the one item that cannot be easily exported without losing
its freshness and hence, the flavor of where it was made.
As he writes in the book’s forward, “Perhaps
literature may provide us with the sense of such immediacy, with
the tastes and smells of different locals—the crumbs, the
crust, the yeast that we recall from our foreign experience.”
Recent events have shown that the United States
cannot withdraw from the international arena. Politically, economically
and culturally, the world is at the same time more united and
more fragmented than it has been in decades. The Fulbright program
was recently reestablished in Afghanistan, and soon that country
will be the host to scholars hoping to learn from other cultures
and share a little of their own. Ironically, the program J. William
Fulbright inaugurated to heal the wounds of World War II is now
needed to promote understanding in a disjointed world. Ferris,
like other colleges and universities across the country, is helping
do that hard work.
In the words of famed French novelist Marcel
Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing
new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
