October 23, 2007
Reception celebrates growing Fulbright community
The 15 Fulbright scholars currently studying at AU hail from 14 different countries, including Egypt, Laos, and Uruguay. (Photo by Jeff Watts)
Natalia Grincheva came to strengthen the arts in Russia, Amine Goulidi came to keep the peace with separatists in Morocco, and Clarice Sandoval came to bolster environmental efforts in El Salvador. Though they each followed a separate path to AU, the three international scholars recently celebrated the thing they have in common—the Fulbright Scholarship.
Grincheva, Goulidi, Sandoval, and 12 other scholars from more than a dozen countries gathered in the Mary Graydon Center Friday, Oct. 12, for a reception honoring AU’s Fulbright scholars. More than a chance to chat with students from around the world, the event took a first step toward establishing a more formal Fulbright community on campus.
“We’re trying to build a Fulbright network at AU,” said International Student and Scholar Services director Fanta Aw. “We have the people here to form that network. It’s just a matter of connecting those dots.”
Other ‘dots’ at the reception included AU Fulbright scholars headed to study abroad, AU Fulbright alumni who’ve recently returned, and faculty who’ve been Fulbright professors or scholars.
For AU’s dean of academic affairs Haig Mardirosian, the cross-cultural gathering represented the heart of higher education. “I spent a lot of time on college campuses as a kid, and my earliest thoughts of colleges and universities were that these were places where people were very different from me,” he said during his welcome remarks. “They spoke different languages, wore different clothes . . . As I grew up, I learned that this went deeper, that this was the way ideas were exchanged. And this is something very important to this university. At AU we believe that no idea lives in isolation, that an idea with a single perspective is just a piece of a larger whole.”
In the first few months of her studies in AU’s arts management master’s program, Grincheva has already begun to glimpse that larger whole in the arts world. Her recent surprise at the differences between American and Russian theatre, for instance, has begun to generate insights.
“I was shocked,” she said, referring to the popular culture references in a modern-dress production of The Taming of the Shrew she recently saw at the Harman Center for the Arts. “In Russia high culture and pop culture don’t mix like this, so it was strange for me. Then I thought about it, and I realized this reflects how the arts are funded differently in each country. In Russia most of the arts are paid for by the government, but that’s not true in America. Here it’s more market driven. So plays have to compete with movies and television, and that, I think, affects the plays.”
For Sandoval, a career aimed at protecting the environment has emerged from the melding of three cultural perspectives. The El Salvador native first became interested in sustainability when she was an exchange student in Germany. “They had ten different recycling boxes; there were no plastic bags at the supermarket; people avoided driving their cars when they could,” she recalled. “I saw how they were putting these theories into action, and how it was working. So I thought, this is something we need to do back home.”
To help make that change in El Salvador, Sandoval is now studying sustainability science and policy in AU’s environmental science master’s program. “I want to use what I’m learning to strengthen our Ministry of the Environment,” she said. “It’s a very young agency, so there’s a lot of work to be done.”
Goulidi, who’s working toward a master’s degree in international peace and conflict resolution (IPCR), has found that the multiple perspectives Mardirosian described also strengthen the classes. “In classes here the professor is more of a facilitator, so you really get to learn from everyone,” he said of his IPCR courses, which are themselves made up of students from around the world. “It’s exciting when the discussions really get going and ideas are bouncing around like a ball in a ping-pong game.”
The reception, which was also attended by representatives from Fulbright sponsoring agencies Amideast and the Institute of International Education, was the first in a series of events Aw hopes will continue to connect Fulbright scholars at the university.
“We have the people,” she said. “Now we need to build the community.”
“At AU we believe that no idea lives in isolation, that an idea with a single perspective is just a piece of a larger whole.” —Haig Mardirosian
