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Scholarships, Global
Posted 28 April 2011 by Marshall Scholarships | Comments

The views expressed in this guest blog do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office or the British Government. This guest blog post is shared to highlight the life and career opportunities experienced by Marshall Scholars who have studied in the United Kingdom. 

In the early 1980s, the song 99 Red Balloons was a big hit in the U.K.  By an obscure German band that I never heard of again, it captured some of the mood of the times, and at least in my memory calls forth some of the aspects of life in England in those days.

You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we’ve got
 
England in the early 1980s had not yet accelerated into the ultra-sophisticated, expensive, globally branded environment that one sees today, where for example it is far easier to find a latte in Central London that a plain cup of tea.  There was an air of very faded elegance in the Brighton/Hove neighborhood from which I commuted to the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex.   Our student “bedsits” came equipped with space heaters and you had to insert 10p coins for a few moments of warmth; hot water was only available for a few hours each day, to keep down costs.  These were not environmental measures, but economic ones; postwar scrimping and saving lived on in a generally budget conscious population.      Daily necessities like wholemeal bread, and “sound” vegetables seemed so inexpensive, but many shoppers took careful note of differences of a few pence.   Simplicity seemed a virtue.
 
99 Red Balloons, floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it’s red alert, there’s something here from somewhere else
 
I was struck when I arrived in England by the strongly engrained “Britishness” and very well defined cultural tradition on the one hand, but the great diversity of people living with me, on the other.  I was surprised by both.  In all aspects of daily life, there was an accepted way to do things, and clarity about the correct behavior.  Yet I attended university with a pool of students from all over the world, and in my 30-member MPhil class, I had colleagues from Africa, India, Latin America, Japan and even Fiji.  Part of this diversity came from the generosity of British scholarships, and part from the nature of my program in Development Studies.  We all had to learn to do things in the tried and true British way, when faced with universal certainty any unanimity of advice;  we shared tips on how to adapt.  I also had the benefit of friendship from two other Marshall Scholars at Sussex – LoriAnn Thrupp and JanAart Scholte, both of whom  were quick adapters! Many habits and customs I retain to this day: I warm the pot when I make my morning tea;  I search for a complimentary remark to offer before any criticism; I keep a rain jacket in the saddlebag of my bicycle; and I put my fork in my left hand and my knife in my right.   I lost the habit of turning up on time when I lived in Brazil for 5 years!     
 
99 Decision Street, 99 ministers meet
To worry, worry, super scurry
Call out the troops now in a hurry
 
Greenham Common, probably unknown to young people today,  was an important place in these years. Women established a peace camp outside the RAF base there, to proteststhe placement of nuclear weapons. In 1982 and 1983, 30,000 women held hands around the 6 miles perimeter of the base, in protest against the decision to site American cruise missiles there.  The peace camp became home to women for years, who continued protests until eventually the cruise missiles were returned to the U.S.  Social movements, including the anti-nuclear movement and the women’s movement, were hallmarks of this age, and the tactics so different from today – they were very physical, relied on large numbers of participants, were sometimes quite radical and endured for years. There was a sense of challenge to old hierarchies, some of it clearly political, and some less well defined, but certainly angry.  This was the age of punks, young people with outrageous green hair, threatening clothes and a nonconformist outlook.  Anarchy was considered a good thing by a number of the social movements in this era; change was clearly sought, and achieved in a personal identity, while aiming for more public transformation.     

It’s all over and I’m standing pretty, in the dust that was a city
I could find a souvenir, just to prove the world was here

There was no apocalypse, but certainly major change did come to Europe,  with the fall of the Berlin Wall, a revised political map and economic growth that lasted for many years, and ate away at the high unemployment, anxiety and anger as well no doubt at the 99p bread loaves and piles of Swedes and turnips. The new royal couple inhabit a country with clear challenges, some of them quite familiar to the Marshall Scholars of the 1980s, but a red balloon at their wedding will be a metaphor for happiness and not a threat. 

The above blog is Jennifer Adams, former Marshall Scholar and State Department Foreign Service Officer currently based in Beijing. 



Marshall Scholarships
28 April 2011
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Posted 27 April 2011 by Marshall Scholarships | Comments

The views expressed in this guest blog do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office or the British Government. This guest blog post is shared to highlight the life and career opportunities experienced by Marshall Scholars who have studied in the United Kingdom.

In 1981, romance to me was a feature of the big wide world, and had come personally to me no closer than "soulmates".  I had already visited Oxford the summer before applying for my Marshall Scholarship, and had even met my doctoral advisor-to-be, Dominic J.A. Welsh of Merton College.  There he whispered to me, "Complexity", in a way different from how I'd heard of this theory before, and this is still my vocation as tenured faculty in Computer Science at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).  The spires beckoned "Simplicity": pen-on-paper and college residence and fewer vicissitudes of grad-courses and forms and apartments and TA-ing.  The bells chimed unobstructed creative ideas, and tongues sang in accents, all to me romance.

As the year struck winter break, I heard Marshall first waitlist then offer.  This put a charge into my Princeton senior thesis work in Mathematics, and set my sights and service across an ocean.  Having soulmates-only freed my spirit while working at my Princeton club, Quadrangle, for I had one and several there.  The one, Marianne Sanua of the class after mine, shared my passion for Broadway musicals, a tradition of seeing one per year we kept long even into my Oxford years.  The several included Jennifer Georgia and her husband-to-be Maury Peiperl.  I could name many more in my club, as we were small and close-knit without cliques.  And part of what bound us was romance writ large, of the much-whispered gaunt Prince and a blushing commoner younger than we.

Dresses and tresses and designs and graces and protocol, custom, and old-borrowed-blue, Jenny knew them all, because she assisted a major advice column.  And she planned a great party to ring in the day, July 29th, at her Maryland home.  Graduation took me up to my parents' in Northern New Jersey, closing the door to my childhood but not to my friends.  With their communion I made my own party, on my father's birthday, but him gone to work and my mother and siblings not up at 6:20am.  I was on time but Diana not quite, and I thought she would burst her carriage with yards of foaming train.  I phoned "Marianne, did you see that?", and a half-stifled yawn said who is this boy, crashing our henhouse from miles away?  The twiddled names brought another call, with peals of astonishment crackling the line.  The cake and the singing we shared, well I had an English muffin with jam.  Of course, as a Marshall I was the one going to the after-event party.

When I arrived it was great as it promised.  I had run Princeton's street hockey club, so I tried field hockey---and jamming the queer stick cracking a rib did not stop me shopping for music.  Or trying out rowing as Britain's new couple brought vibes beyond Thatcher's austerity.  There was one Catholics-not-welcome mat, but I simply stepped on it and it was gone the next week, so Christian fellowship in my college was mine and for many of all the churches all my years there.  Pen-and-paper gave way to a math-typesetting system I championed, which produced 20 theses before mine finally weighed in at 400 pages.

Yet I never did know Charles and Diana's kind of romance during term-time at Oxford.  My one local girlfriend had a job to the south by the time we embraced, and the music of her many Euro nations gave way to discord too soon after.  Helped into a choir by her previous boyfriend, on performance night in the last June term week, I let the accents fade and prayed to hear an American voice.  In seconds I heard one, and a strange whispered pickup line followed her onto the risers.  But it brought Debbie back to me after the concert, and back to my kitchen, and into my heart though back to America for good the next weekend.  With a year-plus to go I subsisted on letters and 50-pence pieces chunked into phones for some minutes of voice.

What happens to Romance now with e-mail and cell-phones and Skype?  Are we too hector-connected to pause and let Britain be Britain removed from the world, to breathe and whisper and hear and let romance build?  Must William and Kate splash our screens not our hearts?  Did Charles and Diana themselves kill it?  Raising a family as they drifted apart, Debbie and I were too busy to ask.  But using this world now to re-connect with old friends, and sending this essay, I can affirm: Let us believe.  Marianne did, and Jenny as her Matron of Honor, in their own wedding party, two years ago.

The above blog is by Dr. Kenneth W. Regan, Marshall Scholar 1981 



Marshall Scholarships
27 April 2011
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Posted 26 April 2011 by Marshall Scholarships | Comments

The views expressed in this guest blog do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office or the British Government. This guest blog post is shared to highlight the life and career opportunities experienced by Marshall Scholars who have studied in the United Kingdom.

I do not recall why I was in London in late July 1981 when Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer.  The academic year was over and most Marshall Scholars were traveling.  I do recall that friends from my junior year abroad at Sussex University were anti-royalists and pressed all in our group to ignore the wedding.

Being American, I was not anti-royalist.  Indeed, I found the monarchy to be one of the intriguing differences between Britain and the U.S. Still, no one knew what the crowds would be like, so I promised my friends not to go in person to watch the procession.  Still, I didn't want to miss out entirely on such an extraordinary event, so I went to the rehearsal.  After thirty years, I still easily recall the beautiful summer evening, the horses, and the carriages.

On the wedding day itself, 29 July, I was in Scotland.  The Marshall Scholars had the opportunity to stay at a guesthouse in the Scottish countryside; it seemed like a good time to go.  I was delighted when the proprietor, dressed in a formal kilt, served champagne as we guests gathered around a large black and white television to watch the wedding.

My friends' opposition to the monarchy was due in part to its contradiction with democracy and in part to a perception of the high costs of maintaining the institution.  At the time of the lavish wedding of Charles and Diana, British universities were feeling the effects of Margaret Thatcher's budget cuts.  At the London School of Economics, where I spent my first Marshall Scholar year, the cuts to funding meant almost a quarter of the student body-mostly overseas students--would no longer receive funding.  LSE averted a crisis by admitting overseas students who could afford to pay tuition.

With these and other actions, Prime Minister Thatcher succeeded in moving the UK away from the socialist-orientation of its economy toward a more firmly capitalist one.

2011 is again a royal wedding year, and the British government is making tough budget cuts, including cuts to higher education funding.  Again a Conservative prime minister is planning to severely cut the government's contribution to LSE, this time by 40%.  In general, university students will be paying almost three times more in 2012 than they paid in 2010.  In response, students in the UK have staged some of the largest protests since the 1960s.

The need for budget austerity in the UK is related to the economic downturn, which has come about largely due to risks taken on by banks and other major investors.  In other words, the downturn can be traced to under-regulated capitalism. The economy also helps explain why pro-democracy movements are finally challenging governments in the Arab world.  Economic hardship has given protestors courage to demand reforms from monarchs and from dictators who often behave like monarchs.  But the way ahead is highly uncertain.

In the UK, the economic pressures have not, so far as I can tell, led to any stronger movement to end the monarchy or even to complaints about the cost of Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding on 29 April. Media coverage does inevitably include the question whether the event will boost tourist income for the UK. (Apparently, it will not.)

What has changed in 30 years?  The Royal Family for one.  The Royal Family's income from the state has been reduced over the years.  More dramatically, Prince William is marrying a commoner.  His father could not.  The couple met at St. Andrews University, where both were students.  No prior queen of England has had a university degree.  And some aspects of their wedding will be more modest-they are marrying in Westminster Abbey, not St. Paul's Cathedral.

It may also be that in 2011, there is something reassuring for the British people-and all of us¬-in a royal wedding.  We have lost our strong certainty about capitalism and even democracy, but the British monarchy is not only surviving, it may be thriving.  It continues to stand for tradition, service, elegance, and even courage in adversity-all things seen in The King's Speech.  The Royal Family's adaptation in challenging times suggests that other great British institutions, in particular British universities, will also come through the current crisis, as they did 30 years ago, not only surviving but thriving.

The universities where I studied, LSE and Cambridge, have the students and faculty who will rise to the current challenges even in conditions of adversity, shaping the world's responses to economic and governance crises.

So on 29 April, though I will be in Munich, I will expect my hostess to wear a dirndl and to serve champagne, while all of the guests watch another extraordinary royal wedding.  This time in color.

The above was a guest blog from Mary Ellen O'Connell, Marshall Scholar, class of 1980. She is now the Robert and Marion Short Chair in Law and Research Professor of International Dispute Resolution-Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame.  



Marshall Scholarships
26 April 2011
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