Straws in the Wind - Part 3

From Inside Higher Ed: Curt Rice, director of the Fulbright Commission of Norway, was ready to tie a bow on this year’s cohort of Fulbright scholars back in January. Norway had selected 17 finalists for the prestigious academic exchange program sponsored by the U.S. State Department and received approval from the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board to accept all of them. The country assumed that scholars would be notified by the State Department, as usual, sometime in the following month.

That never happened. Instead, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent an internal department cable detailing an additional step for the scholarship’s review process, which historically has entailed an initial project review by the Institute of International Education, a secondary review by a panel in the host country and final approval from the FFSB.

Inside Higher Ed obtained a copy of Rubio’s cable, which says that this year State Department officials would give the final sign-off; they have been tasked with rooting out any projects that could violate President Trump’s executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion. All candidates, whether they’d been approved by FFSB already or not, would have to pass. Rice said that of the 17 finalists Norway selected, the State Department ultimately nixed seven of them—about 40 percent of their expected Fulbright cohort. The grounds for their rejections were “clearly political,” he said: The finalists whose acceptances were overruled all had proposals that dealt with either diversity or climate change. In other European countries whose directors shared their numbers with him, he said, the State Department overrode about 20 percent of the selected finalists...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/us-colleges-world/2025/05/29/fulbright-applicants-rejected-over-dei-research-proposals.