Mary Ellen Heian Schmider: 2024 DAAD Honoree for Lifetime Achievement in International Exchange
Acceptance Remarks Delivered April 17, 2024, at the “Celebration of Cultural Diplomacy,” sponsored by DAAD American Alumni Association, with others including the Fulbright Association, the American Council on Germany, and IIE.
I am a Daughter of World War II, not a Baby Boomer, and not a Child of the Depression. My earliest memory is hearing FDR’s voice: “The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor: We are at war!”
Although I grew up in a small Wisconsin town far from Europe or the Pacific, some of the diversity and the awareness that the globe was interconnected was taken for granted: I was Lutheran, the church shaped by the Reformation of Martin Luther whose music we sang at Christmas in German as well as in the Norwegian of my grandparents. Early French voyageurs who intermarried with Native peoples founded the Roman Catholic Church which had the best view in town: on the hill overlooking the Chippewa River; my best friend, Jackie Sue, was the granddaughter of an Eastern European Jewish family who lived across the street.
But the war really came home when our family’s closest “Grandma,” our babysitter, came running down the block crying hysterically: “They’ve killed my son! The Japanese have murdered my beloved John on Iwo Jima.” He, my childhood hero, had been a football co-captain at St. Olaf College, and the photo of the woman to whom he was engaged stayed on his mother’s mantel as a permanent reminder of his loss.
I took action, collecting a truckful of used paper to recycle for the war effort: I became a Full Colonel in the Paper Brigade. My dad, a partner in the Cannery, offered one of his trucks to pick up all I had been promised in the neighborhood after the season when all the peas, beans, potatoes, and corn the factory processed went to Europe to feed the troops.
It was my first volunteer work.
I begin with the story of my beginnings because I’ve spent much of the year, after being nominated for the Lifetime Achievement Award for International Exchange, pondering how I got to this place after a career in higher education as scholar and administrator and one who has spent the last thirty plus years working between national board and Executive Director service for the Fulbright Association and teaching US History and Women’s Studies for the University of Maryland Global Campus both in Europe and online.
It turns out it is all of a piece. My origin story and over sixty-three years of professional life in educational settings are on a direct trajectory of values: concern for peace because the losses war brings affect individuals and communities everywhere, and no one is exempted from the task of rebuilding the global order. We are meant to be of service no matter where our paths lead us. I have an abiding faith that individuals, not just governments, have a role to play in building a world where all people are worthy of respect and care, and where understanding based on the free exchange of ideas in community can grow and assist in peace-making and keeping.
At St. Olaf College, my worlds of church, education, and international engagement came together and have intertwined since, though in stages, Now I see the pattern more fully. I was fortunate to find work that expressed the passions, the values of my life.
When I was 21, in the summer 1959, the crystalizing moment for my life’s direction came: I was part of a summer-long Lutheran World Federation Study Project with 14 American university students. We met in Berlin (divided into zones, but still accessible by U Bahn) with theological students from seven major universities in the East Zone of Germany. The atmosphere in Berlin was palpably out of a mystery-murder narrative as the build-up to the Berlin Wall and the Cold War were formulating. Some of the German students, interrogated at the check point, had to return home immediately or lose their place in the university or worse. In the hours outside of the safe house in the Gruenewald district, we had to be anonymous from one another, realizing we were followed at all times by a “minder” from the Stasi. The Bishop had been informed that “such meetings with Americans are impossible.”
Our host was Probst Grueber, the pastor of the Marien Kirche in East Berlin, about the only building fully standing even 14 years after the end of the war. He, part of the Protestant Confessional Church, had been in the Concentration Camps with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but unlike Bonhoeffer who was hanged just before their liberation, was released before war’s end. Back in Berlin, he built a nursing home for aged Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and years later was the only non-Jew to testify in the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem. His work in the social service sector of the church allowed us to visit Marienfeld, the refugee receiving center, then overflowing with about 10,000 Germans fleeing the East Zone every week.
The deep education, “on the ground in Berlin” was matched by my doctoral dissertation in the Program in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. I focused the philosophy of Social Reform of Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, the Chicago Settlement where immigrants from twenty-eight nations found the beginnings of life together as one nation. Addams was also the President of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. As such, during WWI, she traveled all of Eastern Europe asking heads of state to go to the conference table and stop the slaughter of that horrific war. I have since lectured on her work and on the volunteer tradition in American life to educational and community audiences in over a dozen nations. I was in my second career after leaving Minnesota State University Moorhead as Graduate Dean Emeritus, that I found my intellectual home: FA board and office; and UMGC. The last 30 years have been centered there.
With my first-generation German American husband, we applied to teach for UMUC. We stayed four years in Germany at Ramstein Air Force Base, Heidelberg with seventh army, Mannheim, Coleman Barracks, Kaiserslautern, Landstuhl with its Military hospital, Rhine Ordinance Barracks, and , most intensely, at Incirlik ,Turkey, “ down range” right after 9/11, We returned there in 2003, and as the second round of Iraq war began, we were “neo’d:” when war actually breaks out, education is left behind.
With the Fulbright Program, I held two awards: The Peoples’ Republic of China and The Republic of North Macedonia. I sometimes call my time in the national office as Executive Director a “third Fulbright:” Washington, D. C. is its own country!
Nancy Neill, who so ably outlined much of my work with the Fulbright Association as she introduced me, gave the context for much of what we accomplished during transition years. I’d like to focus on four which characterized the outreaches of the alumni association in the international arena.
The first is the Chapters, which bring together the diverse experiences of our alumni with the opportunity to share some of America with our international grantees. We all continue to learn as we find ways to showcase what is essential to the culture of each region or city in our complex and varied nation.
The second is the Travel Program. We began it when the baby boomers were retiring with continuing interest in educational and cultural travel, but not in full teaching or research assignments. We combined “Insight Trips” with “Service Trips,” and found our shared Fulbright experiences of the past merge with new insights and friends in shorter, but focused travel to places off the tourist radar: Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, Cuba, and more were places we learned and found friends.
The third was the Fulbright Prize for International Understanding. I had the privilege of creating international committees of prominent Fulbright alumni and Executive Directors from around the globe (including Taiwan, Finland, and Kosovo) so that the choices reflected the value of the Program for everyone, not just the Americans who hosted it each year. The highlight for me was to return to Berlin to be on stage with Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her speech underscored the values of the Fulbright as a means for individual and shared cultural learning and diplomacy in pursuit of peace.
It was a spectacular event: normally the Chancellor arrived on time, allowed two photos, spent the hour listening to introductions and speaking, and then left. As I was announcing from the stage that we all needed to stay seated while she departed, the word came that she would stay for 15 minutes. It turned into more than an hour with Fulbright fans crowded in to listen to her conversation and to take selfies of the experience. The photos show her pleasure at being with “close friends.”
Two years later, I co-led the next Prize nomination committee with seven international participants representing Pakistan, Romania, Mexico, Switzerland, Albania, the Philippines, and the United States. We chose Bono. In Washington, DC, attended by many from our Congress and Press Corps, he celebrated “Rock ‘N Roll” in a speech one Senator claimed was “the best speech on democracy I’ve ever heard!” The next week, Bono was in a subway station in Kviv singing to the civilians who were huddled there against the bomb and drone attacks at the outset of the Ukrainian invasion—living his commitment to democracy and peace.
The final, and critical work of the alumni association is Advocacy. It is something all of us are required to practice in this time of fractured alliances, divided politics, and a growing sense that the lessons of war and active peacemaking of the past three-quarter century are being forgotten or disregarded in our fragile world. We need to advocate for the values as well as the reality of the Fulbright Program and the DAAD exchanges which Germany funds globally. We need to be active educators and peace builders at home and in our professional pursuits.
We each need, at the least, to think through our “30 second elevator speech.” Some years ago, with Harriet Mayor Fulbright and Shaz Akram, I visited the office of a Fulbright alumnus in the House of Representatives, Tom Cole of Oklahoma. Having now been in the House for over 20 years, he is a leader on the Republican side. An enrolled member of the Chickasaw Tribe, he holds the Ph D. in History. Here is his 30-second speech: “Both my grandfather and father fought in WWI and WWII. When I received my Fulbright to London, they said, ‘Make some friends over there so we won’t need to go back for another battle.’”