| Summary: | <p>This thesis attempts to demonstrate how the Fulbright Foreign Student Program has transmitted the values of the American Creed—the normative values that underpin U.S. hegemony—to foreign individuals by encouraging, funding, and facilitating academic experiences in U.S. universities since 1946. It builds on constructivist attempts to understand the role of ideas in international relations, particularly in relation to U.S. foreign policy and hegemony. The thesis argues that the exchanges under the auspices of the Fulbright Program constitute a “transmission belt” or socialization mechanism for the values of the American Creed— individualism, democracy, equality, and capitalism—among young foreign intellectual elites, many of whom go on to have careers in their home countries where they put those values into practice. The first empirical section analyzes essays in The Fulbright Difference written by alumni of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, coding and categorizing their responses according to the values of the American Creed that they invoke. The second empirical section explores a single case in depth: that of renowned Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus—founder of the Grameen Bank, pioneer of the concept of microcredit, and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize—who was a Fulbright Scholar at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in the mid-1960s. His memoirs, speeches, and publications demonstrate how his experiences in the U.S. shaped his beliefs in the power and freedom of the individual, in democracy, in equality, and in free-market capitalism, and how those beliefs in turn shaped the Grameen Bank as an institution that upholds and furthers these values.</p>
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