consulate events
Fulbright Alumni Dinner 2003
In honor of the U.S. Ambassador to Greece Thomas J. Miller, The Association of Fulbright Scholars, Chapter of Northern Greece organized a dinner on Wednesday, February 5, 2003 at the Mediterranean Palace Hotel. On that occasion the Association also welcomed the new Fulbright Foundation Executive Director Artemis Zenetou and bid farewell to former Director William Ammerman.
Ambassador Miller's remarks follows:
Remarks by Ambassador Thomas J. Miller
Dinner organized by the
Association of Fulbright Fellows of Northern Greece
Mediterranean Palace Hotel, Thessaloniki
February 5, 2003
Fulbright alumni, Mayor Papageorgopoulos, Professor Akritidis, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for the invitation to address you this evening.
Tonight is a special occasion, although it’s a little bit delayed. We are saying goodbye to one director of the Fulbright Program, William “Chip” Ammerman, who is a good friend of mine, who I worked very closely with, and we are saying hello to the new director, who is not that new for she has been in office for a year, Artemis Zenetou. Chip, as we all know, served with great distinction as the executive director of the Greek American Fulbright Program. I had the distinct pleasure to serve on the Fulbright Board, as was mentioned, for three years when I was the Deputy Chief of Mission in Athens in the mid 1990s. Chip, we all owe you a great debt of gratitude. Thank you very much.
I can tell many stories about Chip, but I think I will not because I know he gets embarrassed.
Artemis, you have a very bright future as the executive director of the Fulbright Program and now you have many ideas leading Fulbright to new directions, as well as preserving the rich traditions of the program, this being the oldest program in Europe. I had a sense of where Artemis’ leadership was going several months ago when she came, burst into my office one day and she said, “I got a great idea.” She said, “I need you to be an advertisement for Fulbright.” “Sure, I am happy to be an advertisement of Fulbright but what specifically do you want?” She said, “in three days is the Athens Marathon and I need you to run with me the last ten kilometers wearing a Fulbright tee-shirt.” I said “sure;” three days later we got up both of us early in the morning and we ran ten kilometers for Fulbright and Fulbright was all over TV… So, if Artemis comes up to any of you and says, “I have a small request,” I would strongly suggest that you get the details first before you say “yes.”
Now, Fulbright directors in any program probably may come and go, but there are some constants that do remain in the Fulbright program. One of the constants is the American commitment to international education in Greece. Remember, ancient Greece provided many of the ideas and much of the inspiration for the founding of our country, for our Revolution, for our constitution and, as most of you well know, we almost adopted the Greek language by one vote instead of English. Some people say that was a mistake. Ever since then, over 200 years ago, we, the United States, the Embassy, my government, have tried to give back something to repay this debt. Moreover, I think it is a deep debt that we will be giving for a long time.
In the early years of the Greek-American relationship, it was about helping the young Greek republic build its academic institutions. In the last part of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century, we worked with Greek educators to create and found five very remarkable and unique educational institutions in this country. In 2003, I am very proud as American Ambassador to note these colleges and schools are flourishing, producing internationally renowned scholarship, and some of Greece’s top graduates, more than 15,000 every year.
The names of these institutions are well known to you and in fact they have representatives in this room. We are talking about the American College of Greece, founded in 1875. The American School of Classical Studies founded in 1881. The American Farm School, started in 1904, almost a 100th anniversary. Anatolia College started in 1924, and Athens College, the baby of the group only started in 1925.
Millions of dollars of the American government and private money from the United States has gone into building these schools. The collective achievements of Greeks studying at these five institutions have been tremendous. Together, the financial commitment and the academic success of these institutions have been a totally unshakable testament to our commitment to quality education in this country.
This commitment today remains the bedrock beneath the US-Greek relationship. When people try to talk about this relationship and about the shared values, shared historical experiences, there are so many connections between our peoples and our countries when you really look at it. You take these five institutions as the bedrock. You can take the Fulbright Program, which is a recent newcomer, when you compare it to those five institutions.
Now, let’s fast-forward to Washington, DC, right after the World War II in 1946, the second part of America’s support for international education in Greece. As was already mentioned, after World War II, Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas had the idea to use money that was coming into the U.S. treasury from World War II reparations to fund scholars. His legislation establishing the Fulbright Program passed through the Senate, our US Senate, without any debate.
Let me just say up front that I think this was one of the smartest decisions ever taken in the post-war period by my government. Today, there are over 250,000, quarter of a million, “Fulbrighters,” 94,000 from the United States and over a 155,000 from other countries, who have participated in this program since its inception 57 years ago. Fulbright alumni include Nobel Prize winners, prime ministers -- I had the pleasure a number of years ago when I was Deputy Chief of Mission to go to a dinner that Ambassador Niles gave with a former Fulbrighter of Greece named Andreas Papandreou -- heads of state, governors and senators, ambassadors and artists, professors, scientists, CEOs of large corporations and the list goes on and on.
More than 1,500 American scholars have taught and studied in Greece through the program over these years. More than 2,000 Greeks have gone to the United States, many of whom are in this room, and I salute all of you who are with us tonight. The Greek Fulbright program, funded by the U.S. government, by the government of Greece, and increasingly by private donations, is the oldest in Europe, founded in 1948.
Some of you, in the early days of the Fulbright program -- in fact I just heard a story from a gentleman who was a Fulbrighter in 1961 -- crossed over to the United States not by air but by sea; this gentleman spent 11 days on a U.S. ship. Now you can do it in less than 11 hours.
Joining us tonight is one of my favorite Fulbrighters, Rita Panouria. She not only studied as a Fulbrighter, but she also worked for many years at the Greek American Commission for Educational Exchanges, otherwise known as the Fulbright Commission. She was a personal friend of Senator Fulbright and I am happy to see her now as a leader of the Fulbright Alumni organization here in Greece. Let us give Rita a big hand.
Senator Fulbright was a Rhodes scholar and had traveled extensively throughout Europe. As a senator, he served his country from 1945 to 1974, and from 1959 to 1974 he was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was not a fuzzy-thinking man. His goal, very simply put, was to build global understanding for America and its values. He understood the shared values of democracy, of open markets, of respect for human rights. Moreover, he also knew that in countries such as Greece, there were millions of people who also shared and did everything they could to uphold these values.
Fulbright himself aptly described the goals of international exchange. This is what he said: “The essence of intercultural education is the acquisition of empathy, the ability to see the world as others see it and to allow for the possibility that others may see something we have failed to see, or may see it more accurately.”
That was Senator J. William Fulbright. That sounds very good today. He left us a number of years ago but what he said still rings very true today. This was not some sweetness-and-light cross-cultural daydream about everyone holding hands. It was levelheaded optimism that gave people a chance to look beyond their own narrow field of vision and helped them understand the world better.
This I would like to think of as the bedrock of what America is all about. Fulbright once said: “The Fulbright Program aims to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason and a little more compassion into world affairs.” We are seeing this every day, in the experiences of scholars like yourselves who are making and have made significant differences, who have touched so many other people, students, colleagues and the larger community in so many different ways.
Over the last year, Greek and American Fulbright scholars under the Aegean Initiative program have been working with their Turkish counterparts to clean up the seas, to protect antiquities and to improve human rights law. Just think about this for a second. If one of my predecessors had stood up here twenty years ago or fifteen years ago and said that about Greek and Turkish scholars working together at these important areas you would have said “that’s crazy”, but now it is a reality, something that you all accept, acknowledge and applaud.
A hearing-impaired Greek student who in 1998 went to Gallaudet University in Washington DC has returned to Greece to open a school to teach English sign language to hearing-impaired Greek kids.
Yet a third example, a young Greek woman who received a Fulbright grant in 1992 -- twelve years ago -- to study aeronautical engineering has just become the first woman professor to teach aeronautical engineering at Rutgers University, one of our better engineering schools.
The list goes on, but you get the idea. Educational exchange makes us all richer; makes our nations better.
We face difficult days ahead in the war on terror since September 11 and the situation with Iraq right now, with the spread of weapons of mass destruction and the threats they pose around the world. This kind of uncertainty, these kinds of threats make the foundation of understanding between our two countries, this foundation that we have all worked so hard to build, even more vital. There is a lot of media hype that we all see about the differences and the problems in the U.S.-Greek relationship. But programs like Fulbright very much underline the shared values, the essential values that unite us all, that transcend some of these daily differences and enable us to weather any storm.
Europe and the U.S., as well as Greece and the U.S., have many shared ideals. People who have traveled to the other side of the Atlantic to study or to work, or study in Greece at American-type schools, are potential “translators” of those ideals and values for their own cultures. It is one thing for a nation’s leaders to carry on a political dialogue. It is another and very important to have an intellectual and social dialogue between our two peoples, and that is where the Fulbright program does such a great job.
Whether it is Greek and American agricultural scientists talking to each other about bio-tech, or Greek and American archaeologists debating the significance of a particular find, or Greek and American architects working together to build housing and other kinds of buildings, Fulbright deepens and widens communication between our two nations and two peoples. And, alongside Fulbright, is the continuing legacy of the five schools I mentioned earlier and the colleges we built together in Greece many decades ago.
This is what I mean about the bedrock beneath the bilateral relationship. That is why I am glad to be here with you tonight; to reaffirm my personal pledge -- and I mean this with all my heart because I have very strong feelings for the Fulbright program -- and the commitment of my government to support and to continue to support educational exchange between our two countries.
I ask your help in this effort, because those of you here tonight who have benefited so much know better than anyone else the impact that this program has not only on your lives but the lives of so many others. I see every day what educational exchange does for the US-Greek relationship. I know it can do even more tomorrow.
Thank you very much.