In March 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a cable to Fulbright program country directors based abroad and Fulbright advisors on US campuses notifying them that the ongoing Fulbright selection process would diverge from its standard process by including an unusual, final review by the State Department. State department officials subsequently rejected up to 25% of finalists on apparently ideological grounds.
The Fulbright Fellowship program awards approximately 8,000 grants annually for US scholars to study, teach, and conduct research in other countries. Typically, an independent nonprofit contracting agency (the Institute of International Education) conducts a review of all submitted project proposals for initial eligibility. A National Screening Committee, made up of full-time faculty members at US higher education institutions with disciplinary or region-specific expertise, conducts a second review and makes recommendations for further consideration. A panel in each host county – which may include senior academics and others with relevant expertise, Fulbright Commission staff, US Embassy representatives, and Fulbright alumni – conducts a last round of review and makes the final selection. When Congress created the program, it gave the authority for final approval to the Fulbright Fellowship Selection Board (FFSB). In 2025, the State Department changed that process, stating that State Department officials would be responsible for final approval of all projects.
In early June 2025, media sources, including the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, began reporting that the State Department had rejected a large number of projects approved by IIE, the in-country panel, and the FFSB. No official reasons were given for the rejections, but they appeared to be ideologically driven, targeting projects dealing with topics that the administration had criticized in other executive or policy actions, including, for example, diversity or climate change.
On June 11, all but one of the 12 members of the FFSB resigned in protest of the State Department’s actions. In the resignation statement, the FFSB noted that they had raised their concerns with senior administration officials multiple times, including in writing, and had received no response. They wrote that they had chosen to resign “rather than endorse unprecedented actions that we believe are impermissible under the law, compromise U.S. national interests and integrity, and undermine the mission and mandates Congress established for the Fulbright program nearly 80 years ago.”
Scholars at Risk is concerned about apparently ideologically motivated government interference in the evaluation and selection of academic research projects, which threaten to undermine academic quality and erode the higher education sector and public confidence in US government research programs and outputs.
Sources:
https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/latitudes/2025-06-04
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/06/11/fulbright-board-resigns-en-masse-over-political
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/us-colleges-world/2025/05/29/fulbright-applicants-rejected-over-dei-research-proposals
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/12/nx-s1-5431470/fulbright-board-resigns-political-interference
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/us/politics/fulbright-board-resign-trump.html
https://substack.com/inbox/post/165673358?r=17cemi
https://us.fulbrightonline.org/about/competition-selection