In this issue of the Fulbright Center News we invite you to celebrate our partners and our alumni. A record number of Finnish universities are participating in the Center's grant programs this fall by cost-sharing – 75% of the Finnish graduate student awards are partially or fully sponsored by our partners (p. 4). The Fulbright Center has signed another long-term cooperation agreement with a Finnish university. The new agreement provides grants for U.S. graduate students to study at the University of Turku, which has been very active recently in North-American exchanges, particularly through cooperation with Fulbright. We are very pleased to introduce to you our partner university in this issue of the News (p. 10–13). Further along the lines of cooperation, I am pleased to announce that the Fulbright Center will soon be moving to new premises (p. 22). Our current office, while beautiful and centrally located, has become too small to host our growing activities. But we are moving not only because of improved training facilities and bigger auditoria, we are also moving closer to our partners. The Centre for International Mobility CIMO of the Finnish Ministry of Education and the National Board of Education have long been valued partners to the Center. As we now have daily contact, the ideal location is, in short, next door to each other. It is for this reason that we are moving into the same building at Hakaniemenranta 6 in Helsinki, and we expect to be in full swing there in early 2009. The Fulbright Center and CIMO will launch a new level of their partnership by organiz-
From the Executive Director
Kolumnit
ing a national seminar in mid-December titled Finnish-North-American University Cooperation: Curriculum Development and Joint Programs (p. 9). The seminar features invited speakers from the United States, Canada and Finland and aims to benchmark best practices and concrete tools for cooperation for transatlantic exchanges. We welcome you to the seminar and look forward to having you visit us in our new premises in the new year! This Fall issue of the Fulbright Center News is also a theme issue for our alumni. Articles, interviews, and collections of reminiscences, all in their own voice, speak to the power of the Fulbright experience. As we honor our alumni from the past six decades of Finnish-American Fulbright exchanges, I am very pleased to present to you the invited columnist of this issue. He is a distinguished American alumnus of our program, Librarian of the U.S. Congress, Dr. James H. Billington. Dr. Billington was a Fulbright researcher in Finland in 1960–61 and later chaired the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board in Washington. Over the course of his Fulbright he became a great friend of Finland and has returned many times, including this Fall. Much has changed in Finland since the early 60's of Dr. Billington's Fulbright, but the very fundamentals of the Finnish-American program that he describes remain exactly the same to this very day: the pursuit of academic excellence, the transformative nature of the personal experience in intercultural exchange, and the welcoming network of Fulbright in Finland and around the world. It is in this spirit that we wish you a prosperous fall season!
Terhi Mölsä
Treasured memories My wife and I and our two very young daughters spent the better part of the academic year 1960–1961 in Helsinki on a Fulbright research grant working in the National Library. Things were still a bit austere in Finland in those days. Finns experienced a small version of what they called a “night frost” with the Soviet Union, and lettuce during the winter was sold leaf by leaf. Fresh produce was hard to come by in the dead of a Helsinki winter. Yet for me professionally, and for our family personally, it was one of the happiest and most productive times of our lives. It was not easy to use libraries then in the Soviet Union, though I made one extended trip into St. Petersburg to give the first series of lectures on the then new Harvard-Leningrad exchange program. The Helsinki Library had been a deposit library for the Russian Empire from 1809–1917. It was beautifully serviced and maintained with Scandinavian efficiency. I was thrilled to find that the basic organization of the stacks was by decade throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and I was permitted to work in the stacks. As a result, I was able to read the original versions of Russian literary and historical writings and periodicals and then read the response and criticism of them in subsequent journals of the same year. This permitted an immersion in Russian literature of a kind that few scholars are able to have. This opportunity enabled me to focus on transforming a course I was giving at Harvard into probably my most important single scholarly work; The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. I became fascinated with Finland as a total society. Having our very young kids run along free outside with their “park aunt” during the week was a thrill for them. My wife and I enjoyed seeing them both having fun and not having a single cold or adverse effect from the harsh winter weather. Stopping off for lessons in the Finnish language with Mrs. Altio,
who was a marvelous language teacher, enabled me to manage enough Finnish while I was there to read such works as The Seven Brothers, whom I could never quite relate to, and Väinö Linna’s Here Under the Northern Star. I always wondered why he didn’t get a Nobel Prize. I loved shopping for books on the way back from the library and then walking on to our apartment on Runeberginkatu. I enjoyed regular saunas, warm human associations with Finns, and a particularly memorable trip to Kuopio up north which has the special beauty of a very different type of 19th century wooden town. The beautifully displayed treasures of the Valamo monastery of the Finnish Orthodox Church were far more attractive and reverently displayed than comparable treasures in the Soviet Union. Central to the experience was the wonderful series of events for me and my wife that made dark evenings shine thanks to a magnificently ordered Fulbright program in Finland under Sven Sjögren. I have since returned regularly and always happily to Finland to keep up with old friends and to hear the glorious music under the midnight sun at Savonlinna. Later, as a member of the Board of Foreign Scholarships that runs the Fulbright program world-wide and as its chairman in the early 1970s, I always held up the Finnish Fulbright program as a model for what an exchange program should be. Every time I return to the National Library overlooking the beautiful square, it will always be for me a kind of homecoming.
James H. Billington Librarian of Congress