As the entire Fulbright board resigned last week and as the program that promotes international visits for US researchers, and vice-versa, may not survive the Trump administration, I thought I would recount some memories from my Fulbright scholarship to the Netherlands in 1996-97.
The program had considerable paperwork for a relatively small stipend, but it went beyond the compensation. I went to a meeting in Amsterdam with the other fellows, mostly grad students and postdocs. I was the old one as a recently tenured associate professor. The others had strong reasons for being in the Netherlands: An historian who wanted to research the Dutch army, and a piano player with hands too small who came to study with the world's leading teacher on a specialized narrow-keyboard grand.
And so they asked me why I would go to the Netherlands from the US to study computer science. But I spent the sabbatical year at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (Center for Mathematics and Computer Science) in Amsterdam working with Harry Buhrman, Leen Torenvliet, Paul Vitányi and others. I also made several trips to universities in Germany, England, France and Israel, and had one of my best research years.
My coolest Fulbright experience was having Thanksgiving dinner at the US ambassador's house in The Hague, perhaps the most American thing I did during the year.
I also participated in celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Fulbright program, established in 1946 to encourage international educational and research collaborations, alongside the Marshall Plan and NATO, to draw the US closer to Europe and later the rest of the world. Too bad we seem to be moving away from those ideals today.
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