Reply #64: simply wrong

[realcountrymusic]

You and Darth Kitten need to read some of the other posts in the thread. Fulbright fellowships are based on merit, not need, and are awarded through a blind process. No matter who your father (or mother) is, or howmuch money your family has, you don't have any advantage in this kind of process (other than a lifetime advantage of having had a good education and a family that supported that, which I admit is a significant one). But being a Kerry or a Clinton or Jane Sixpack has no bearing on the Fulbright award process.

I simply don't get this little bubbling current of anti-intellectualism among progressives. There is nothing wrong with recognizing and awarding intellectual accomplishment. It does not help poor kids get better educations if Vanessa Kerry doesn't get a Fulbright. Indeed, the Fulbright program has helped lots of working class American students, and thousands of students from poor and developing countries who could otherwise never have studied in the US. It's a shining light of American education policy. Oppose legacy affirmative action at good schools and you have my support. Oppose the property tax funding of public schools and you have my support. Oppose the Fulbright fellowship program of the US DOE, and you lose this progressive entirely. Knowledge, achievement, and exchange are unqualified good things. Resentment of the accomplishments of others, cloaked in populist tones of anti-elitiism, is not progressive to me.

I'm sorry to post so much in this thread, and so heatedly. I happen to care very much about this issue, and I believe I know something about the subject. America without the Fulbright fellowships is intellectually impoverished.

RCM