This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Included in the Trump administration's most recent budget proposal is a 47 percent funding cut to the Fulbright program. If passed, these cuts would effectively gut Fulbright. This would be a grave mistake.
I cannot emphasize the following enough. To cut the Fulbright program in half would be to cut our country's commitment to its foreign partners, as well as to excellence in education, tenfold.
As a Fulbright English teaching assistant in Malaysia, I am sharing with you from my desk at school why this money makes a difference.
The number of students at my school getting an "A" on their English exams has doubled each year since entering the ETA program in 2015. For many of those students, that now means attending university. We're also bringing creative young students from all over the country to Kuala Lumpur — a city which most of them had never seen — to participate in a national dance competition as a way of promoting creativity, art, health and English learning.
But that's not all. We've bought books and organized science fairs, we've launched anti-bullying campaigns and entrepreneurship programs. We've organized trash cleanups in the fragile Southeast Asian ecosystem, and we've shown our students firsthand the power of a good book. And we're just getting started.
It is absolutely critical that our influence not disappear. In Malaysia, Islam is the predominant state religion, and an increasingly conservative brand of Islam is slowly taking hold. The so-called Islamic State is actively recruiting and trying to build cells in this country. To simply back away is to abandon the peaceful, loving Muslim hearts and minds that we so readily claim to want to win over.
These young students are passionate, they are caring and they are loving, but they are impressionable. Outside of Kuala Lumpur, resources are scant, and impressions of our current administration are already overwhelmingly negative. Our work here means more now than ever before.
The Fulbright program provides driven and passionate people with an incredible chance to venture out and spread American culture, values and ideals, then bring back new ones to share. It has given thousands of us, for 71 years, the chance to push the boundaries of our education into a global space and spread more across borders than just an economy or a war. As a pillar of education and humanity, this cut would be a devastating blow resonating so much farther than our own ears.
This cannot become the next data point in the administration's disturbing trend of creating foreign policy on the fly with reckless abandon, or simply ignoring it altogether. To let this program, which represents the best of what America has to offer the world, be ravaged in the name frugality would be an error. Doing so would destroy 71 years of hard work, good policy, and goodwill with the stroke of a pen.
Is that what "America First" looks like?
Sabrina Dawson is a Fulbright English teaching assistant from the U.S. to Malaysia through the U.S. Fulbright Program. She graduated from the University of Utah with degrees in international studies and political science, with a focus on foreign policy and security.