by Nancy Snow
In April 1992, the German Fulbright alumni magazine FRANKly published my article, “Cultural Mediation and the Fulbright Ideal.” At the time, I had already
In the early 1990s, I was writing as a young Fulbright alumna trying to explain the idea of cultural mediation. Thirty-four years later, after three Fulbright awards (Germany, Japan, Greece), a doctoral dissertation entitled Fulbright Scholars as Cultural Mediators, which became the intellectual foundation for much of my later work on public diplomacy, and a 2026 paper prepared for the Turkish Fulbright Commission, “Resilient Exchanges: Fulbright, Narrative Identity, and the Human Face of Public Diplomacy in Hard Times,” I find myself asking the same question: Is cultural mediation still a Fulbright ideal?
My answer is yes but with an important addition. Cultural mediation is not simply what Fulbright participants do. It is how Fulbright survives.
Looking back, I can see that I have spent my career asking different versions of the same question: How do people change one another across cultures? My research eventually expanded beyond Fulbright to examine soft power, national narratives, propaganda, and public diplomacy, but the underlying concern never disappeared.
If I could sit down with the Nancy Snow who wrote “Cultural Mediation and the Fulbright Ideal” in 1992, I suspect she would recognize much of what I believe today. She would still insist that exchange is about people before policy and relationships before rhetoric. But I would also tell her that cultural mediation is more demanding than I imagined.
Cultural mediation requires living with ambiguity, resisting stereotypes, and accepting that understanding another culture rarely means agreeing with everything about it. It means learning to hold admiration and criticism at the same time. Germany first taught me that lesson. Japan and Greece reinforced it. I now realize that cultural mediation is not a stage one passes through. It becomes a lifelong habit of mind and action. I mentor younger scholars because of my Fulbright identity. I collaborate with international scholars because of my Fulbright experience.
I believed then that Fulbright scholars serve as cultural mediators—not official diplomats, but interpreters of people, societies, and ideas. They return home carrying stories that complicate stereotypes and deepen understanding. We need to hear their stories now more than ever.
I find myself returning to that article now with equal measures of nostalgia and surprise. Nostalgia because it reminds me of the optimism that characterized the post-Cold War era. Surprise because, despite dramatic changes in world politics, the central idea has held up well. If anything, today’s geopolitical climate makes cultural mediation more necessary than ever.
In 1992, the Berlin Wall had fallen only a few years earlier. Liberal democracy seemed ascendant. Globalization promised increasing openness. Educational exchange was widely viewed as an investment in a more interconnected world. I began working at the U.S. Information Agency and U.S. State Department right out of graduate school where we read Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” and Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations.”
Today, the international landscape feels very different and also the same. As Yogi Berra famously observed, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
Nationalism and authoritarianism are surging. Great-power rivalry has intensified. Universities increasingly find themselves caught in geopolitical competition. Exchange programs face budget pressures, visa restrictions, political suspicion, and demands to demonstrate measurable “impact” to retain funding.
Yet the Fulbright Program endures, despite these challenges. That endurance raises an important question. Why?
My recent paper for Fulbright Ankara argues that the Fulbright Program survives because its deepest achievements cannot be reduced to strategic messaging or policy outcomes. Its greatest strength lies in the realm of human relationships, narrative transformation, and what I call experiential legitimacy—the authority that comes from having actually lived another culture rather than merely reading about it.
In many respects, this is an extension of what I was trying to say in 1992. Back then, I focused on cultural mediation. Today, I would add another phrase: the human face of public diplomacy.
Throughout my academic career, I have studied propaganda, public diplomacy, strategic communication, and soft power. These concepts often emphasize states, institutions, and communication strategies. Yet Fulbright continually reminds us that unofficial diplomacy occurs around dinner tables, in classrooms, on trains, during family visits, and through lifelong friendships.
Those moments rarely appear in annual reports, yet they are often where diplomacy succeeds.
One lesson has become increasingly important to me over the years. We in the policy and political communication sectors have become exceptionally good at measuring things. We count publications, grants, partnerships, citations, social media engagement, and survey responses. These numbers matter. But they tell only part of the story.
How do we measure the international Fulbright scholar who returns home with a more nuanced understanding of another society? Or the student who changes a lifelong perception of another country? Or the friendship that quietly shapes a future diplomat, journalist, professor, or policymaker?
These are precisely the outcomes Senator J. William Fulbright envisioned, yet they remain notoriously difficult to quantify.
Narratives, in other words, are evidence too. We are eyewitnesses and earwitnesses to knowledge and perspective gained through experiences living in other cultures and participating in academic environments different than our home countries.
Historians rely upon testimony and anthropologists rely upon observation, while diplomats depend on trustworthy reporting.
The history of diplomacy itself is built upon memoirs, letters, diaries, interviews, and lived experience. Fulbright naturally generates precisely this kind of evidence. Narratives are qualitative data. They deserve to stand alongside quantitative indicators rather than beneath them.
Public diplomacy is ultimately about people. Governments communicate officially. Institutions communicate bureaucratically. But trust develops between human beings.
That is why Fulbright remains one of the most resilient forms of public diplomacy ever created. It is a trust-building relationship process. A Fulbright experience cannot succeed without devoting oneself to the trust-building blocks of a successful academic exchange. Those building blocks include collaboration, teaching, community outreach, and endeavors that make our Fulbright experiences “go public” in service to the program’s mutual understanding mission.
The Fulbright Program does not seek immediate outcomes of persuasion and influence. It cultivates longer-term understanding. And as international relations become increasingly dominated by strategic competition and information warfare, this human dimension becomes even more valuable in the digital and AI era.
If I were rewriting my 1992 article today, I would change very little. I would still describe Fulbright scholars as cultural mediators. I would still argue that exchange transforms not only careers but also identities. The only addition would be a greater appreciation for something that thirty-four more years of scholarship and life have taught me. The human encounter is not merely the outcome of Fulbright. It is the mechanism through which Fulbright achieves its mission.
That may also explain why the program has endured through the Cold War, globalization, the digital revolution, pandemics, political polarization, and renewed geopolitical rivalry.
Exchange programs remain among the few international institutions built on the premise that mutual understanding begins with individual encounters rather than official messages. In many ways, I have spent more than three decades exploring the implications of the questions that first emerged during my Fulbright year in Germany.
This reflection comes at a time when educational exchange programs face renewed uncertainty. Around the world, governments increasingly ask what exchange “produces” and whether its benefits can be measured in immediate policy returns or economic outcomes. Those are understandable questions. Yet they overlook Fulbright’s greatest contribution: it develops citizens who have learned, firsthand, that another society is more complicated, more humane, and more interesting than stereotypes suggest. That kind of learning cannot always be captured in a spreadsheet. It is revealed in conversations remembered decades later, friendships that endure across borders, and careers devoted to building bridges rather than walls.
If my 1992 FRANKly article argued that Fulbright participants become cultural mediators, I would now add that they also become custodians of memory. They carry stories that resist simplification and remind us that diplomacy begins not with governments, but with people. That, to me, remains the enduring Fulbright ideal.
Nancy Snow, Ph.D., is a three-time Fulbright scholar and internationally recognized authority on public diplomacy, propaganda, and strategic communication. A former U.S. Information Agency official and Professor of Communications Emerita at California State University, Fullerton, she has taught and conducted research across Europe, Asia, and the United States, including as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Freiburg. Her forthcoming book, Battleship Diplomat: The Enduring Legacy of the USS Missouri (Naval Institute Press, 2026), explores the intersection of diplomacy, history, and the power of human connection. She can be reached at https://nancysnow.com
