Education for Peace and Freedom - Fulbright.no

 International Student Festival in Trondheim

Student Peace Prize Award Ceremony

Grand Hall, Student Society

University of Trondheim, Norway (NTNU)

17 February 2005

 

Harriet Mayor Fulbright

 

Good afternoon. I am honored to be part of the fifth anniversary of the ISFIT international student festival at Trondheim to honor your brave colleagues in the Asociacion Colombiana de Estudiantes Universitarios (ACEU) of Colombia.

Your theme “Education. Why?” is especially close to my heart, my work, and that of my  husband, Senator J. William Fulbright. The Fulbright international education exchange program mirrors your Festival’s mission of bringing together people across borders of culture, nation, politics, and religion in order to teach, learn, and promote understanding.  More than 250,000 Fulbrighters in over 140 nations now form a community of cross-cultural activists and leaders.

Today, we are expanding the Fulbright legacy by founding a new Fulbright Center that will mount more programs—such as Dialogues for Peace and efforts to share best practices in pre-college education, both to foster democratic processes in education—and to encourage greater openness in societies. 

Bill Fulbright’s legacy is rooted in education, the first pillar of personal liberty and social freedom alike.  The “Why” of education is not just that it securely attaches personal self-improvement to social and economic advancement.  Education urges us to walk in someone else’s shoes, to seek and prize understanding of other cultures, other philosophies, other life choices than our own. It gives us the tools to advance ourselves, but also our communities. Education insists that people can use reason and understanding to solve problems and govern themselves.  Its relation to peace is active and close.  Listen to some of Fulbright’s own thoughts on what it takes to secure peace and nonviolent resolutions to conflict:

Here are his remarks on the signing of the United Nations Charter –

“Peace is not a negative, static concept. . .not a tranquil state of felicity and blessedness. It is a positive method of adjusting the endless conflicts inherent in the nature of restless and energetic [human beings].  . . .Our participation in this process is not just the signing of a charter with a big red seal.  It is a daily task, a positive participation in all the details and decisions which together constitute a living and growing policy.”

I want to emphasize that peace should not be confused with friendship. One can be peaceful with people you don’t like.  What is important is respect for others’ positions and for the law.

Let me say that, at times in the United States today, this is a large assignment, but there are millions of Americans who face the task with energy and realistic optimism.  We, like you, know that the struggle for peace and freedom is continual and exists in all societies at all times.

Senator Fulbright clearly linked education to a healthy political system this way --“Creative leadership and liberal education, which in fact go together, are the first requirements for a hopeful future.”

Today we hear much loose talk about “liberty” and “freedom.” It’s important to think about what they mean in practice.  To consider what education means to each concept as we work individually in our societies for greater liberty coupled with stronger community.

Just as peace is not a passive end-state, but an active process—so “liberty” and “freedom” require active participation.  But they are different.

There is no one true definition of liberty and freedom in the world, as the historian David Hackett Fisher points out, but the words have a surprising history.  The oldest known word having such a meaning comes, in fact, from ancient Iraq, on a Sumerian tablet. It derived from a verb that meant “going home to mother” (something hungry university students can relate to) – but was used to describe emancipated slaves and servants.

But “liberty” differs from “freedom”. The Latin

libertas

and Greek

eleutheria

both indicated independence is the opposite of slavery.  Freedom, though, is rooted in the same word as “friend”—meaning a connection to other free people by bonds of kinship or affection.  As Fisher writes, “Liberty and freedom both meant ‘unlike a slave.’ Liberty meant privileges of independence; freedom referred to rights of belonging.”

For most of us, the two ideas blur together. They’re inherited ideals that we hold onto as what de Toqueville called “habits of the heart.”  Recent American scholars including Robert Bellah, who wrote a book with that title, continue the tradition of worrying that we as a people have come to value personal liberty above freedom’s choice of community.   

Freedom as connection and solidarity, the ties of affection or interest or kinship that bind us all in different ways.  Liberty as the freedom of every individual to find his or her own way.

With this distinction in mind, I am especially moved to be part of today’s ceremony in which Norwegian students honor the university students’ association of Colombia, for their persistent, courageous work in advocating for political rights and a peace negotiation process rather than continuing violence in Colombia.  

I am moved by the parallel between the Colombians’ risky work in a society of murderous factionalism and corruption, and the bravery of an earlier Norwegian student generation who were a key element of this country’s resistance to Nazism and the Quisling regime. 

In this 60^th anniversary year of the end of World War II, we celebrate the university student resisters who were the core of “XU,” the largest, most important intelligence-gathering organization in occupied Norway from July 1940, just a few months after the occupation.  Education was key to their effectiveness. XU built ties with professionals around Norway—in railways, police, and so forth, collecting maps and detailed information.  The group also helped distribute illegal newspapers containing forbidden news bulletins.

In the same manner the effectiveness of the Colombian University Students Association has built since it began in 1998. It has collaborated effectively with other groups and international supporters to struggle for the right to participate in student democracy and national politics.  Several leading members have been imprisoned, tortured, and killed; many have been forced to flee their homes.

ACEU shows that the struggles for education and democratic freedom are inseparable. 

It shows that strength and courage redouble with the force of community, both local and global, behind them.

The Norwegian resistance had a symbol: people wore a paper clip on their lapels. It represented uniting to resist the occupation. The paper clip, of course, holds separate individual items together for some purpose.  A simple, innocuous item with a powerful message: liberty for individuals means freedom to unite in support of community.

ACEU also has a symbol formed by abstractions of their initials – AC – which symbolize the linking of human beings, and all of us here feel great pride in linking with them in their struggle.

It is now my pleasure and great honor to award the Student Peace Prize 2005 to representatives of the Asociacion Colombiana de Estudiantes Universitarios.