t
05 '86
Washington International Center
TO: FROM: RE: Prof. Albertson Bob
Kohls~
DATE: August 1, 1986 Dear Maurey,I did so very much appreciate meeting you, and I was most grateful for a place to spend the night. Many, many thanks.
Bob Kohls
.I
ON PROMOTING UNDERSTANDING OF OTHERS AMONG THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: REALIZING THE THIRD INITIATIVE OF THE PEACE CORPS
by
Robert Kohls Vice President
Meridian House International and Executive Director
Washington International Center
Presented at The National Seminar on Future Directions for the Peace Corps Fort Collins, Colorado
I am unable to find words to describe the flood of emotions I am f~'eling right at this very moment, as I am magically
trans-ported 20 years intb the past to t he days when I was completely immersed -- day and night -- in Peace Corps training. And I can-not think of an audience I would rather address than one composed mainly of returned Pea ce Corps volunteers. Thank you for this opportunity.
"Thank you," too, to Peace Corps the institution, now about to celebrate its 25th birthday. Although I had already had two overseas living exp eriences before Peace Corps was ever conceived, it is Peace Corps t hat was resp onsible for my entering the field of intercultural training. It is no exaggeration to say that the Peace Corps changed my life. And I am certain many of you may have made that very same statement.
I directed six large Peace Corp training programs i n the mid-and late-60s: two for Korea, two for Libya, and one each for Tunisia and Brazil.
My f i rst Peace Corps-type experienc e came in wha t I call the "pre-Peace Corps Peace Corp s," fr om 1953 to 1956, wh e n my wife and I served as non-salaried, voluntary relief workers in Korea, with one of the organizations after which Peace Corps modeled itself. It was, as the current TV commercial says, "the hardest job I'd ever love." So although, technically speaking, I have never been a Peace Corps volunteer, I consider myself an RPCV. I hope you will permit a harmless old man this little delusion.
May I see a show of hands of the RPCVs in the audience? •••
.
Well, I can see we're certainly in the majority!Before I give you the two messages I came to deliver today --that's right, only two messages -- I want to digress a bit and mention the people whom I call the "forgotten RPCVs," the ones you know who were "deselected" or who had a negative experience, who "failed" and dropped out and came home early. They're not here today. But there are many of them. From its inception to the present day, Peace Corps has had a consistant 30+% dropout rate. That's nearly 1/3 of all those who had the urge to join the Peace Corps, who ended up having a basically negative exper-ience. And we musn't forget them as we plan how to mobilize RPCVs in the celebration of the silver anniversary of Peace Corps. Somehow their experience, too, must be acknowledged and dealt with.
Now, having said that, that's the only negative conunent I'm going to make today. In fact, I might as well warn you, some of you are going to criticize me for being blindly, unrealistically optimistic. I've tried it the other way, and believe me, I'm not unaware of all the enemies and the ignoramuses who are lying in wait out there, but I just can't afford, at my age, to let them ruin my life. And quite frankly, I do see a greater number of indicators that are encouraging than discouraging. That's one of the advantages of growing old. Your years of experience are long
enough to give you a point of reference, and you can recall, with
1
incre~sing clarity, just how bad things were in the "good old
days."
Incidentally, if there has been any mini-theme which has repeated itself throughout this conference, it has been the recurring comments of some of the "old Peace Corps trainers" that "there is nothing new in Peace Corps," "They're still raising the same old questions and discussing the same old issues." "It's the same as it was when we were involved in it in the mid-and late-'60s." And that's very true. I can't tell you how exciting things were in the Peace Corps in the mid- and late
160s when we were inventing at least two new training activities
every week. If we didn't invent two of them one week, it had been a bad week. So it comes as a shock to us "old timers" to see they're still using what we invented.
What has changed (and this is the first message I've come to give) what has changed (while we weren't looking) is the American public's awareness. I find that most of my colleagues in the intercultural field haven't noticed the changes yet, but positive changes are happening with increasing regularity. It's still no Utopia. There is still much more ignorance than enlightenment out there in the "real world." But I have been feeling lately, on my cheeks, the faint winds of change and the gentle breezes of increased awareness. It's by no means a mass movement, but I have learned to become encouraged over even the slightest signs of improvement.
·And I would like to share with you today, in no special order, some of the random indicators that have come to my atten-tion and about which I am unashamedly optimistic. Not one of these incidents amounts to much in and of itself, but taken all together, I see them as hopeful signs and as the only real assur-ance I have that I have not wasted the last 25 years of my life.
In the first place, I have noticed that I can now use words like "cross-cultural" or "culture shock" to people who are not in our field and they don't look at me with that dazed, confused look.
concepts
They know what I'm talking about. that underlie them are now
These words, and the in every intelligent American's vocabulary, whether they have ever had an overseas living experience or not.
15, or even 10 years ago.
That wasn't the case as recently as
Another indicator is that I get, on the average, about two telephone calls every week from people in the corporate sector whom I don't even know and very often from companies I haven't ever heard of, asking me, "What is this cross-cultural training, and where do you get it?" That didn't happen even two years ago. In the May-June 1985 issue of the Harvard Business Review Alan Webber wrote something which helps explain why: "'Ego,' Norman Mailer once wrote, was the word of the 1970s.
contender for the word of the 1980s, it
The leading seems, is
'globalization. 111 A global view global needs global
problems ••• global resources ••• global opportunities ••• global crises global information and data global programs and projects ••• the global environment ••• the global context •••
An official with Lockheed told me a few months ago that t he reason American bus i nesses have sudd enly gotten i n t e rested in international business is that the domestic prof it margin runs about 9 to 11 %, in comparison with international profits of from 22 to 24 %. Yes, the motivation for this sudden global awareness is not the purer , more idealistic motive of Peace Corps volunteers, but "the business of America is business," and I find these indicators from the business world to be extremely significant because if we can win the business corrununity over, we can surely convince anybody. They're our most difficult audience to convert.
To me it is unbelievable that within the past two month s the Wall Street Journal has had four front-page articles focusing on t he i n tercultural aspects of international business. Do you k now what it takes to make the front pag e of the Wall Street Jou r n al? President Reagan made it when he bombed Libya.
Within the past six to eight months, I have been invited to cities as diverse as Atlanta, Minneapolis, Tampa, Dallas, Boston and Seattle to participate in large-scale programs proclaiming each of these cities as an "International City." Whether they actually are international cities is not the issue. The fact
that they want to be is what is significant.
On the academic front, there are now 240 universities across the country which are offering undergraduate courses in the discipline of intercultural communication. There were exactly three -- the Universities of Minnesota, Pittsburgh, and Delaware -- doing so when I started Peace Corps traini ng. There are, in addition, now 55 universities offering master's degrees and 25 with doctoral programs in intercultural communication. Any of you who are on university campuses throughout American know how very difficult it is to start a new academic discipline and have
it accepted.
Another indicator is the fact that what I call "the big three" of consulting organizations involved in marketing inter-cultural training to American business -- IRI (the Interinter-cultural Relations Institute, BCIU (the Business Council for International Understanding) and Moran, Stahl and Boyer -- have, each of them, only moved solidly "into the black" within the past three years. It has been "rocky" going before that. Moran, Stahl and Boyer is about to establish a European bas e of opera tions.
Also "the big three" of youth exchange programs AFS International/Intercultural, Youth for Understanding, and the Experiment in International Living -- although much older and more established than their counterpart organizations in the business world, are presently enjoying their peak years of funding.
'
The 1986 SIETAR (International Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) Conference, held in Amsterdam in May of this year, was the first one in which there was active recruiting of American trainers by European companies. American trainers are the hottest items in Europe right now, just after blue jeans and MacDonald's hamburgers.
Training itself, as a separate field, we are reminded by Anthony Carnevale of ASTD (the American Society for Training and Development) is a 30 billion dollar per year industry within the American private sector!
And Alvin Tofler has recently predicted that training will be the big industry of the next decade. (There's big money in training: be the first in your neighborhood to learn!)
My next "indicator" is an offhand remark made by Secretary of State George Schultz in late 1985, on his return from visiting three Eastern European countries. At first it may not sound like it's worth quoting or getting excited about. Some of you will want to dismiss it as an obvious truism. But in my view it is a profound realization. Secretary Schultz said, "The most obvious word to characterize the countries of the world is 'diversity'." Why do I think that simple statement is so profound? Because it is the first time we mave realized and recognized publically that other countries might legitimately have different values,
differ-'
.ent goals and different worldviews than we. And that it's
alrig~t for them to be different. The Americans I know have
always been very threatened by differences. So I consider it a giant leap to recognize and legitimize those differences. I don't know whether Secretary Schultz was alluding to the phrase of John F. Kennedy when he spoke of "making the world safe for diversity," but it certainly brings it to mind once more.
In another way, about the time of our Bicentennial, in 1976, there seemed suddenly to come over America a realization that America is not really a "Melting Pot" (or if we were, we hadn't been very successful at it) and about that time we began using the metaphor of a "Mixed Salad" or a "Stew," where all the separ-ate pieces maintain their distinct identity but are blended together so that they compliment all the other separate and distinct pieces. The furt her glorification of America's "ethnic richness" or "cultural pluralism," and the realization that this diversity is one of our richest resources, and the accompanying pride in our ethnic roots represents one of the most remarkable
turn-arounds any country has ever made.
And not many Americans have noticed it yet, but one of t he most hopeful signs of all -- even though it will take another 20 years or more to make its full impact felt on mainstream America -- is the ever-expanding variety to be found in the immigration patterns of America. What began as a largely British immigration in our Colonial days, had broadened, by the mid-19th century, to include Germany and Scandinavia and Catholic Ireland. From
there, it moved even farther afield to encompass Eastern Europe and Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. It has now, and tbis is the encouraging part to whicb I refer, taken in the Tbird World and the non-Western world, till today we have the richest and most encouraging mix of Southeast Asians Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong -- and East Asians -- Chinese, Koreans, Japanese -- Filipinos, Malaysians, Indians, Pakistanis, Afghans, Iranians, Arabs, Mexicans, Cubans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Ethiopians, Somalis, and who have I forgotten? The whole world is not "at our doorstep" but literally "within our walls." This is the most hopeful sign of all! And we can't even begin to realize the positive and modifying effects these diverse peoples will eventually have on American and Americans, as we learn first-hand that "the most obvious word (to paraphrase Secretary Schultz) to characterize Americans is diversity -- and diversity is a rnagnificant thing!"
All in all, I am more optimistic than I have ever been in nearly 60 years of living.
That Peace Corps is alive is a miracle!
That Peace Corps is alive and well is unbelievable!
That there is still idealism in America! That there is still commitment! That there is still hope! I can hear the words of Anne Frank, "In spite of all this, I still believe that people are good at heart."
With 120,000 RPCVs across this country, in every State of the
Uni on,~ we may already have reached the Critical Mass wh ich will
tran~form America so that it will match our tremendous potential
for greatness!
If we could only mobilize 120,000 RPCVs, there is no power on earth that could stop us!
But is won't just happen by itself. It won't happen just because you and I would like to see it happen. It's going to require a lot of planning and a lot of organizing -- on a nation-wide basis. And it's going to require a budget and a staff and a tremendous amount of hard work. But it's worth it!
And the time is NOW. We must piggyback our "takeover of America" onto the 25th anniversary of Peace Corps, when there is high visibility of RPCVs in each community.
Let me now turn to my second message. That is to share a case study with you which will demonstrate that it can be done. This is a real case, one t hat real l y happened, and my purpose i n recounting it in some detail is to make you realize the miracles that can be brought about by committed people acting at the right moment in human history.
Peace Corps, with all of its volunteers, assigned to foreign countries, thinks of itself as not having a domestic constituency. That's why this case study of the Fulbright
Exc hange of Scholars Program has special relevance. The story is
a live demonstration of how massive public support from a
public which Fulbrighters didn't even realize they had -- was rallied in 1981 and 1982, when it appeared that the Fulbright program was about to be decimated, cut to a mere 1/3 of its numbers.
It is also a very timely story in light of projected Grarnm-Rudman cuts in most Federal programs, and when Peace Corps is being told, simultaneously, to trim its budget and increase the number of its volunteers.
The story involves the rallying of public support for the program through the organizing of thousands of present and former Fulbright scholars (who had never been mobilized as a group
before) in a massive letter writing campaign to Congress. And
not just Fulbright scholars were involved, but the whole network of "blood-relatives" who would naturally be allies in the cause:
the Board of Foreign Scholarships, higher education
associa-tions, university professors (many of whom had had foreign teach-ing assignments), area studies centers in universities in every state, and all
(including such
of the major international education groups prestigious organizations as the Institute of International Education, the National Association of Foreign
Student Affairs, the Council for International Educational
Exchange, and the National Council for International Visitors) • These sound like formidable organizations, but I know them all,
and they are all made up of frail human beings like you and I.
The
1981-82 efforts were so successful, in fact, that what started out to be a 66% reduction in the program ended up becoming (through the resulting Pell Amendment) a mandateddoublin~ of educational exchanges over a five-year period.
But the most amazing evidence of the effect of this movement would come five years later when President Reagan was to meet with Mr. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union to determine what the two nations could do to lessen East-West tensions. One of the few specific "solutions" which President Reagan would suggest in that meeting was an exchange of Soviet and American citizens. In five short years, he had become convinced of the efficacy of exchange programs!
At the time of the Fulbright success of 1981-82, there were fewer than 50,000 Americans who had participated in the Fulbright Exchange Program! Nothing at all like the army of 120,000 RPCVs you have to work with.
Many former Fulbrighters had risen to positions of leader-ships, here and abroad, in government, academia, the media and the arts. But then so have many RPCVs.
Prior to the effort described in this case study, educational exchange programs were considered of such low priority in the awareness ·of the American public that, for all practical
purpose~, such programs were thought to be virtually without a
constituency.
There is reason for optimism and hope in this case study, and it has "real world" relevance to the Peace Corps and its cause at age 25.
Sometimes it takes the kind of adversity which faced the Fulbright Program, or sometimes it takes a particularly noble cause, to mobilize such unprecidented action and to mount an aggressive, effective campaign. But it seems to me that the world is in a situation of great adversity. And it also seems to me that, in this last quarter of the 20th century, there is no nobler "calling" in which any of us could be involved than in promoting international understanding.
God knows its not too early. It m~y already be too late.
Or, perhaps, the time is just precisely Eisht for us to make our move!
I want to close with my favorite quotation. Tielhard de Chardin:
The age of nations is past. It remains for us now, if we do not wish to perish, to set aside the ancient prejudices and build the earth.
It is from
There's a lot of earth-building to do. And all of us here, together with 120,000 RPCVs, can surely do it.
... NJ;
05
'86
Washington International Center
DATE: August 1, 198
TO:
FROM: RE:
Dear Maurey,
I did so very much appreciate meeting you, and I was most grateful for a place to spend the night. Many, many thanks.
Bob Kohls
Meridian House International
1630 Crescent Place NW, Washington, DC 20009 (202) 332•1025
·'
ON PROMOTING UNDERSTANDING OF OTHERS AMONG THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: REALIZING THE THIRD INITIATIVE OF THE PEACE CORPS
by
Robert Kohls Vice President
Meridian House International and Executive Director
Washington International Center
Presented at The National Seminar on Future Directions for the Peace Corps Fort Collins, Colorado
I am unable to find words to describe the flood of err,otions I am fe'eling right at this very moment, as I am magically trans-ported 20 years intb the past to the days when I was completely immersed -- day and night -- in Peace Corps training. And I can-not t hink of an audience I would rather address than one composed mainly of returned Peace Corps volunteers. Thank you for this opportunity.
"Thank you," too, to Peace Corps the institution, now about to celebrate its 25th birthday. Although I had already had two overseas living experiences before Peace Corps was ever conceived, it is Peace Corps that was responsible for my entering the field of intercultural training. It is no exaggeration to say that the Peace Corps changed my life. And I am certain many of you may have made that very same statement.
I directed six large Peace Corp training programs in the mid-and late-60s: two for Korea, two for Libya, and one each for Tunisia and Brazil.
My first Peace Corps-type experienc e can e in what I call the "pre-Peace Corps Peace Corps," from 1953 to 1956, when my wife and I served as non-salaried, voluntary relief workers in Korea, with one of the organizations after which Peace Corps modeled
itself. It was, as the current TV commercial says, •the hardest job I'd ever love. 11 So al though, technically speaking, I have
never been a Peace Corps volunteer, I consider myself an RPCV. I hope you will permit a harmless old man this little delusion.
May I see a show of hands of the RPCVs in the audience? •••
.
Well, I can see we're certainly in the majority!Before I give you the two messages I came to deliver today --that's right, only two messages -- I want to digress a bit and mention the people whom I call the "forgotten RPCVs," the ones you know who were "deselected" or who had a negative experience, who "failed" and dropped out and came home early. They're not here today. But there are many of them. From its inception to the present day, Peace Corps has had a consistant 30+% dropout rate. That's nearly 1/3 of all those who had the urge to join the Peace Corps, who ended up having a basically negative exper-ience. And we musn't forget them as we plan how to mobilize RPCVs in the celebration of the silver anniversary of Peace Corps. Somehow their experience, too, must be acknowledged and dealt with.
Now, having said that, that's the only negative comment I'm going to make today. In fact, I might as well warn you, some of you are going to criticize me for being blindly, unrealistically optimistic. I've tried it the other way, and believe me, I'm not unaware of all the enemies and the ignoramuses who are lying in wait out there, but I just can't afford, at my age, to let them ruin my life. And quite frankly, I do see a greater number of indicators that are encouraging than discouraging. That's one of the advantages of growing old. Your years of experience are long
enough to give you a point of reference, and you can recall, with
incre~sing clarity, just how bad things were in the "good old
days."
Incidentally, if there repeated itself throughout
has been any mini-theme which has this conference, it has been the recurring comments of some of the "old Peace Corps trainers" that "there is nothing new in Peace Corps," "They're still raising the same old questions and discussing the same old issues." "It's the same as it was when we were involved in it in the mid-and late-'60s." And that's very true. I can't tell you how exciting things were in the Peace Corps in the mid- and late
'60s when we were inventing at least two new training activities every week. If we didn't invent two of them one week, it had been a bad week. So it comes as a shock to us "old timers" to
see they're still using what we invented.
What has changed (and this is the first message I've come to give) what has changed (while we weren't looking) is the American public's awareness. I find that most of my colleagues in the intercultural field haven't noticed the changes yet, but positive changes are happening with increasing regularity. It's still no Utopia. There is still much more ignorance than enlightenment out there in the "real world." But I have been feeling lately, on my cheeks, the faint winds of change and the gentle breezes of increased awareness. It's by no means a mass movement, but I have learned to become encouraged over even the slightest signs of improvement.
And I would like to share with you today, in no special order, some of the random indicators that have come to my atten-tion and about which I am unashamedly optimistic. Not one of these incidents amounts to much in and of itself, but taken all together, I see them as hopeful signs and as the only real assur-ance I have that I have not wasted the last 25 years of my life.
In the first place, I have noticed that I can now use words like "cross-cultural" or "culture shock" to people who are not in our field and they don't look at me with that dazed, confused look. They know what I'm talking about. These words, and the concepts that underlie them are now in every intelligent American's vocabulary, whether they have ever had an overseas living experience or not.
15, or even 10 years ago.
That wasn't the case as recently as
Another indicator is that I get, on the average, about two telephone calls every week from people in the corporate sector whom I don't even know and very often from companies I haven't
ever heard of, asking me, "What is this cross-cultural training, and where do you get it?" That didn't happen even two years ago. In the May-June 1985 issue of the Harvard Business Review Alan Webber wrote something which helps explain why: "'Ego,' Norman Mailer once wrote, was the word of the 1970s. The leading contender for the ••• word of the 1980s, it seems, is
'globalization. 111 A global view global needs global
problems ••• global resources ••• global opportunities ••• global crises global information and data global progra~s and
projects ••• the global environment ••• the global context ••• An official with Lockheed told me a few months ago that the reason American businesses have suddenly gotten interested i n international business is that the domestic prof it margin runs about 9 to 11 %, in comparison with international profits of from 22 to 24 %. Yes, the motivation for this sudden global awareness is not the purer, more idealistic motive of Peace Corps volunteers, but "the business of America is business," and I find these indicators from the business world to be extremely significant because if we can win the business community over, we can surely convince anybody. They're our most difficult audience to convert.
To me it is unbelievable that within the past two months the Wall Street Journal has had four front-page articles focusing on the intercultural aspects of international business. Do you know what it takes to make the front page of the Wall Street Journal? President Reagan made it when he bombed Libya.
Within the past six to eight months, I have been invited to cities as diverse as Atlanta, Minneapolis, Tampa, Dallas, Boston and Seattle to participate in large-scale programs proclaiming each of these cities as an "International City." Whether they actually are international cities is not the issue. The fact
that they want to be is what is significant.
On the academic front, there are now 240 universities across the country which are offering undergraduate courses in the discipline of intercultural communication. There were exactly three -- the Universities of Minnesota, Pittsburgh, and Delaware -- doing so when I started Peace Corps training. There are, in addition, now 55 universities offering master's degrees and 25 with doctoral programs in intercultural cornrnunicatioP-. Any of you who are on university campuses throughout American know how very difficult it is to start a new academic discipline and have
it accepted.
Another indicator is the fact that what I call "the big three" of consulting organizations involved in marketing inter-cultural training to American business -- IRI (the Interinter-cultural Relations Institute, BCIU (the Business Council for International Understanding} and Moran, Stahl and Boyer -- have, each of them, only moved solidly "into the black" within the past three years. It has been "rocky" going before that. Moran, Stahl and Boyer is about to establish a European base of operations.
Also "the big three" of youth exchange programs AFS International/Intercultural, Youth for Understanding, and the Experiment in International Living -- although much older and more established than their counterpart organizations in the business world, are presently enjoying their peak years of
Th~
1986 SIETAR (International Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) Conference, held in Amsterdam in May of this year, was the first one in which there was active recruiting of American trainers by European companies. American trainers are the hottest items in Europe right now, just after blue jeans and MacDonald's hamburgers.Training itself, as a separate field, we are reminded by Anthony Carnevale of ASTD (the American Society for Training and Development) is a 30 billion dollar per year industry within the American private sector!
And Alvin Tofler has recently predicted that training will be the big industry of the next decade. (There's big money in training; be the first in your neighborhood to learn!)
My next "indicator" is an offhand remark made by Secretary of State George Schultz in late 1985, on his return from visiting three Eastern European countries. At first it may not sound like it's worth quoting or getting excited about. Some of you will want to dismiss it as an obvious truism. But in my view it is a profound realization. Secretary Schultz said, "The most obvious word to characterize the countries of the world is 'diversity'." Why do I think that simple statement is so profound? Because it is the first time we mave realized and recognized publically that other countries might legitimately have different values,
differ-ent goals
alrig~t for
and different worldviews than we. And them to be different. The Americans I
that know
it's have always been very threatened by differences. So I consider it a giant leap to recognize and legitimize those differences. I don't know whether Secretary Schultz was alluding to the phrase of John F. Kennedy when he spoke of "making the world safe for diversity," but it certainly brings it to mind once more.
In another way, about the time of our Bicentennial, in 1976, there seemed suddenly to come over America a realization that America is not really a "Melting Pot" (or if we were, we hadn't been very successful at it) and about that time we began using the metaphor of a "Mixed Salad" or a "Stew," where all the separ-ate pieces maintain their distinct identity but are blended together so that they compliment all the other separate and distinct pieces. The further glorification of America's "ethnic richness" or "cultural pluralism," and the realization that this diversity is one of our richest resources, and the accompanying pride in our ethnic roots represents one of the most remarkable turn-arounds any country has ever made.
And not many Americans have noticed it yet, but one of the most hopeful signs of all -- even though it will take another 20 years or more to make its full impact felt on mainstream America -- is the ever-expanding variety to be found in the immigration patterns of America. What began as a largely British immigration in our Colonial days, had broadened, by the mid-19th century, to include Germany and Scandinavia and Catholic Ireland. From
there, it moved even farther afield to encompass Eastern Europe '
and Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. It has now, and this is the encouraging part to which I refer, taken in the Third World and the non-Western world, till today we have the richest and most encouraging mix of Southeast Asians Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong -- and East Asians -- Chinese, Koreans, Japanese -- Filipinos, Malaysians, Indians, Pak istanis, Afghans, Iranians, Arabs, Mexicans, Cubans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Ethiopians, Somalis, and who have I forgotten? The whole world is not "at our doorstep" but literally "within our walls." This is the most hopeful sign of all! And we can't even begin to realize the positive and modifying effects these diverse peoples will eventually have on American and Americans, as we learn first-hand that "the most obvious word (to paraphrase Secretary Schultz) to characterize Americans is diversity -- and diversity is a magnificant thing!"
All in all, I am more optimistic than I have ever been in nearly 60 years of living.
That Peace Corps is alive is a miracle!
That Peace Corps is alive and well is unbelievable!
That there is still idealism in America! That there is still commitment! That there is still hope! I can hear the words of Anne Frank, "In spite of all this, I still believe that people are good at heart."
With 120,000 RPCVs across this country, in every State of the
Union,~ we may already have reached the Critical Mass which will
transform America so that it will match our tremendous potential for greatness!
If we could only mobilize 120,000 RPCVs, there is no power on earth that could stop us!
But is won't just happen by itself. It won't happen just because you and I would like to see it happen. It's going to require a lot of planning and a lot of organizing -- on a nation-wide basis. And it's going to require a budget and a staff and a tremendous amount of hard work. But it's worth it!
And the time is NOW. We must piggyback our "takeover of America" onto the 25th anniversary of Peace Corps, when there is high visibility of RPCVs in each community.
Let me now turn to my second message. That is to share a case study with you which will demonstrate that it can be done. This is a real case, one that really happened, and my purpose in recounting it in some detail is to make you realize the miracles that can be brought about by committed people acting at the right moment in human history.
Peace Corps, with all of its volunteers, assigned to foreign countries, thinks of itself as not having a domestic constituency. That's why this case study of the Fulbright
Exchange of Scholars Prograrr. has special relevance. The story is
a live demonstration of how massive public support from a
public which Fulbrighters didn't even realize they had -- was rallied in 1981 and 1982, when it appeared that the Fulbright prograrr. was about to be decimated, cut to a mere 1/3 of its numbers.
It is also a very timely story in light of projected Grarnm-Rudman cuts in most Federal programs, and when Peace Corps is being told, simultaneously, to trim its budget and increase the number of its volunteers.
The story involves the rallying of public support for the program through the organizing of thousands of present and former Fulbright scholars (who had never been mobilized as a group
before) in a massive letter writing campaign to Congress. And
not just Fulbright scholars were involved, but the whole network of "blood-relatives" who would naturally be allies in the cause:
the Board of Foreign Scholarships, higher education
associa-tions, university professors (many of whom had had foreign teach-ing assignments), area studies centers in universities in every state, and all of the major international education groups (including such prestigious organizations as the Institute of International Education, the National Association of Foreign
Student Affairs, the Council for International Educational
Exchange, and the National Council for International Visitors) • These sound like formidable organizations, but I know them all,
and they are all made up of frail human beings like you and I. The 1981-82 efforcs were so successful, in fact, that what started out to be a 66% reduction in the program ended up becoming (through the resulting Pell Arnendment) a mandated doubling of educational exchanges over a five-year period.
But the most amazing evidence of the effect of this movement would come five years later when President Reagan was to meet with Mr. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union to determine what the two nations could do to lessen East-West tensions. One of the few specific "solutions" which President Reagan would suggest in that meeting was an exchange of Soviet and American citizens. In five short years, he had become convinced of the efficacy of exchange programs!
At the time of the Fulbright success of 1981-82, there were fewer than 50,000 Americans who had participated in the Fulbright Exchange Program! Nothing at all like the army of 120,000 RPCVs you have to work with.
Many former Fulbrighters had risen to positions of leader-ships, here and abroad, in government,· academia, the media and the arts. But then so have many RPCVs.
Prior to the effort described in this case study, educational exchange programs were considered of such low priority in the awareness ·of the American public that, for all practical
purpose~, such programs were thought to be virtually without a
constituency.
There is reason for optimism and hope in this case study, and it has "real world" relevance to the Peace Corps and its cause at age 25.
Sometimes it takes the kind of adversity which faced the Fulbright Program, or sometimes it takes a particularly noble cause, to mobilize such unprecidented action and to mount an aggressive, effective campaign. But it seems to me that the world is in a situation of great adversity. And it also seems to me that, in this last quarter of the 20th century, there is no nobler "calling" in which any of us could be involved than in promoting international understanding.
God knows its not too early. It may already be too late. Or, perhaps, the time is just precisely right for us to make our move!
I want to close with my favorite quotation. Tielhard de Chardin:
The age of nations is past. It remains for us now, if we do not wish to perish, to set aside the ancient prejudices and build the earth.
It is f rorn
There's a lot of earth-building to do. And all of us here, together with 120,000 RPCVs, can surely do it.
