"...the experience of living here in New Zealand has given me
the chance, as we say in
the States, to put my money where my mouth is."
- Robert Weir
Robert Weir
Robert Weir, a labour historian and Associate Professor
of Liberal Studies at Bay Path College, Massachusetts, was a 2001 Fulbright
Senior Scholar based at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington.
He was researching the Knights of Labour, America's largest 19th Century
labour union which had formed 36 assemblies in New Zealand.
I'm a labour historian, and I'm here doing a project, a comparative
nineteenth century labour organisation called the Knights of Labour, whom
I doubt anybody in this room has heard of... So you know I do some fairly
esoteric stuff I suppose, but I just couldn't dreamed of doing this
when I was a kid.
I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school, let
alone to go on to get a PhD, let alone to go on to a get a Fulbright scholarship,
so this is an amazing experience for me. It's also an amazing experience
for me because I didn't go to Harvard. I didn't go to Yale and
I don't teach at Harvard or Yale and I'm very grateful for Fulbright...
I teach at a small women's college in western Massachusetts. In fact
when I used to teach at the University of Massachusetts I used to have
lecture groups in introductory US history that are larger than the incoming
class at Bay Path College where I currently teach. I'm very, very
grateful that Fulbright evaluated my application on the basis of research,
not on the basis of prestige of the institutions with which I've
been associated...
But I want to talk a little bit about not just the amazing opportunities
and professional contacts that I've had here in New Zealand....
I would like to say that American undergraduate students are in much better
shape now than when Senator Fulbright first proposed the programme and
was concerned about the cultural ignorance of the Americans. I would like
to say that, but it's not true.
Several of the students that I have back at the States, and these are
pretty good students, the first question they ask me when they found out
that I got a Fulbright to New Zealand is "what part of Australia
is that?". My students are all the time just amazed when they meet
exchange students from India and find out that they speak English...
One of the courses I teach is global history, there's a challenge
for you. The history of the world in two semesters. And one of the things
that I do in that course all the time is try to get students to confront
not just the things that they don't know, but the assumptions that
they make about the rest of the world... And I think the experience
of living here in New Zealand has given me the chance, as we say in the
States, put my money where my mouth is. To live in another culture, to
experience that culture and to take back some of the things that perhaps
can challenge the next generation of American citizens, to think about
the assumptions that they make in the world.
In all likelihood I probably will get enough research done here to write
another book and get another very, very paltry royalty cheque. But I think
that that is only a short-term thing, of what it will mean to be Fulbright
scholar. The long term will be the things that I take back to the classroom.
And I think those things will sustain me for the rest of my, my teaching
career...
