10 August 2009

Passport to Success

After studying economics in the United States, Mohammad Yunus pioneered the microcredit system. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

Many veterans of foreign study programs go on to achieve great things for themselves and their nations.

Thousands of people worldwide carry the name of a senator from Arkansas along with their own. They are Fulbrighters, close to 300,000 individuals who have won Fulbright scholarships since the program first received funding from the U.S. Congress in 1946 with the sponsorship of Senator J. William Fulbright. Since then it has become one of the world’s most widely recognized and prestigious programs for international scholarship. The program, administered by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), gives scholars an opportunity to conduct study and research abroad. The record of achievements made by these scholars has established clearly that Fulbrighters give back to the world.

Muhammad Yunus came to the United States as a self-described “shy, 25-year-old lecturer in economics” to conduct advanced study with the help of a Fulbright fellowship. A decade later, crushing and unchanging poverty in his native Bangladesh led him to invent a new concept in lending, the micro-loan. By offering small-businesspersons, most of them women, small loans at reasonable rates of interest, the micro-credit concept allowed struggling entrepreneurs to gradually build capital and expand. Yunus institutionalized the micro-credit concept by founding the Grameen Bank, and the concept has since been copied in many other places around the world. Yunus and the bank were winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. President Obama awarded Yunus the Presidential Medal of Freedom in July 2009. That is the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Yunus spent seven years in an exchange program at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. In a 2007 speech on that campus, Yunus said of his experience, “Vanderbilt has made me bold, made me dare, and that helped in defying things, and unless I had gained that defiance in me, I wouldn’t be able to do the things I did.”

Before entering politics, former Peru President Alejandro Toledo studied at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University.

Yunus is not the only link between the words “Fulbright” and “Nobel.” Osamu Shimomura of Japan and Jean-Marie Le Clézio of France are both Nobel Prize-winning Fulbrighters. Shimomura won the 2008 Nobel in chemistry, and Le Clézio landed the literature prize that same year.

“It would have been impossible to do anything without Fulbright,” said Shimomura, whose research in the United State s led to the isolation of a protein that has become one of the most important tools in contemporary bioscience. Shimomura received a Fulbright scholarship in 1960 to conduct research at Princeton University.

Le Clézio taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz under a Fulbright award in 1979.

Shimomura and Le Clézio were the 38th and 39th Fulbright alumni to receive Nobel Prizes. A total of 39 Fulbright alumni from 11 countries have been honored by the Nobel committee, according to ECA.

The bureau keeps tabs on its veterans and further reports that 18 Fulbrighters have served as heads of state or government. One of those is Alejandro Toledo, who served as Peru’s president from 2001 to 2006. Prior to his political career, he studied economics at California’s Stanford University, and returned there to deliver a commencement speech in 2003.

“There is no better investment that a person, a community, or a nation can make than investing in the minds of our people,” Toledo said. “At Stanford, I discovered that nothing compares to investment in a human mind. ... Nobody can expropriate what you have in your head. No bandit can steal it. No government can take it away. It cannot even be destroyed by war.”

ECA records on the accomplishments of Fulbright alumni also show that 11 have been elected to the United States Congress.