The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece by Christopher Phelps, professor of history at Ohio State University, who is currently in Poland on a Fulbright grant. He praises Senator Fulbright and the Fulbright Program, but he is also very critical:

America, if viewed from Europe, is disconcerting today. (…) Jonathan Steele, writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, considers the United States to be in "dangerous ignorance of the world, a mixture of intellectual isolationism and imperial intervention abroad." I am inclined to accept those painful criticisms. In the aftermath of American conduct in the Phillippines in 1898, the Harvard philosopher William James said he had the feeling of having lost his country. I experienced an identical feeling when the United States invaded Iraq.

Perhaps we should extend the Fulbright program to Congress. Most senators and representatives have never traveled outside the United States. (…) If our representatives lived and studied abroad for a few months before taking office, it would expose them to the world's complexity. It might humble us.

(…) It was not immaterial that Senator Fulbright was a former Rhodes scholar and president of the University of Arkansas, but Congress's motivation [for the creation the Fulbright program] in 1946-47 was neither cerebral nor pacifist. It was to win the cold war. "We have intellectuals," the Fulbright program said. "America is not a land of yahoos!" Sixty years later, the world still demands proof.

Fulbrighters handle the position of cultural ambassador in various ways. Some treat it as a holiday. Others hesitate to dissent from American policy while abroad. I have taken the approach that the Fulbright is a call to public service, and that the democratic interest is best upheld by free expression.

(...) That kind of independent judgment [=reference to Senator Fulbright] is worthy of emulation at a time when some would once again conflate dissent and treason.