Hana Ripková

Letošní sérii Fulbright Podcast CZ symbolicky uzavírá dlouholetá ředitelka české Fulbrightovy komise HANKA RIPKOVÁ, naše největší odbornice na vysokoškolské studium ve Spojených státech a nositelka prestižní Ceny svobody Woodrowa Wilsona. V posledním podcastu, připraveném v angličtině, vypráví o tisícovce výjimečných Čechů, kteří za dobu jejího působení odjeli do USA, i o tisícovce Američanů, kteří naopak v rámci programu dorazili do ČR. Dozvíte o současných výzvách tohoto regionu i o tom, proč se „na Fulbrighta“ může přihlásit každý, kdo je ochoten strávit čas pečlivou přípravou svého projektu. Mluvit budeme například i o programu amerických lektorů pro české střední školy, který česká Fulbrightova nadace pod vedením Hanky Ripkové vymyslela a pečlivě monitoruje.

This interview with Hanka Ripková wraps up a one-year series of podcasts with Czech Fulbright program alumni to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Fulbright program worldwide and the 30th anniversary of the Czech Fulbright Commission. Twelve stories of people who became Fulbrighters, and that moment had changed and reshaped their lives. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Hankarepkova has been the executive director of the Czech Fulbright Commission since 1996 for the last 25 years. Ever since then, a thousand Czech scholars traveled to the US, and a similar amount came from the United States to the Czech Republic. So we are here today to discuss the 2000 people, to talk about them, to talk about Mrs. Repkova Kareer, and also to discuss a little bit the challenges of the higher education in the region. Welcome in the Fulbright Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Thank you, Veronica. Thank you for the welcome. Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

So Hanka, 2,000 people. Do you know them all personally? Do you all remember them?

SPEAKER_00 1:01

I remember most of them, I would say, and uh sure I met all of them with all the Czechs since the very beginning of the program. We were personally interviewing all those who were applying for a Fulbright scholarship and with the Americans, yes. We welcomed all of them here in the Czech Republic and then took care uh of them during their stay here. So, yes, I do remember uh most of them, and I certainly met all of them.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

I can imagine, and I know that your application process is very thorough, and there are many people evaluating the projects and its applicants. But yet, do you have some sort of like a guts feeling or common sense when you interview people? Because often maybe the you know, the specialties they are, the majors they are studying, might not be, you know, that you might not know them that well, but do you kind of feel okay, this is gonna be a great Fulbrighter based on your experience?

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Uh the review process has several levels, and uh of course, uh, those people who are then sitting on the selection committee are not experts in all the fields in which we are interviewing. That's why, for especially the scholar category, we use expert reviews of people from uh the different fields, and based on those reviews, the selection committee tries to figure out not if the person is the right expert in the field, but uh that we are trying to figure out if the person would fit the Fulbright program. Uh, the main goal of the program is not only to bring uh back and forth the best scholars or the best students, but uh there is a bit more to it. Uh the main motto of the program, in fact, talks about uh trying uh to get to know the nations, which means that we are trying to export those people who would then uh make good impression uh of the Czech Republic in the US. And uh on the other hand, we are bringing in Americans who are in fact part of public diplomacy here in the Czech Republic because not only are they working in their fields or on their projects, but at the same time they are representing uh United States in the Czech Republic. And that uh part is the one that the selection committee is trying uh to figure out during the interviews, and we do live interviews, of course. Sure, sure, this period uh with the pandemic uh shifted everything a little bit, and we were quite uh uh worried whether the way we interview people uh can be carried out in the online uh form. But uh I think that after this year's experience, we can say that uh there is no big difference for us uh in interviewing in person and online. Uh I think that this main idea that we are uh trying to look for the best representatives of the country to send to the other country to bring it. It's very important that uh can be somehow uh found out during the interview.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

When I interviewed the dozen of Fulbrighter for this podcast, there was often like a repetitive theme of a real passion, not only for their work, but also for the country as such, for the United States as such. So uh I was wondering if if it's if this is a common nominator for many of the applicants that they just have to go to the US and study the major they love there.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Uh I'm not 100% sure whether uh they have that passion already before they go. I certainly hope that most of them develop that passion after their stay in the United States and bring it back with them. And again, the same way. Uh I hope that most of the Americans who visited the Czech Republic as Fulbrighters during all those years. In fact, the Commission is 30 years old now. Yes. So we hope that all those Americans have kept Czech Republic somewhere in their heart and they still act as, in some way, representatives of that streak of uh being uh tied to the Czech Republic even now after years of being back in their homes.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

You reminded me an important information actually that you are celebrating 25 years in as an executive director, but in fact, you have been working for the Football Commission ever since it started in the Czechoslovakia back then, which is 30 years, so you are basically having two anniversaries. Back in the 90s, like what were the biggest challenges after the Cold War? What were you facing back then?

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Uh we had uh all sorts of challenging. The very first one was that uh the Fulbright program in fact started even before the commission uh was uh founded here. And uh the processes through which the people were selected before the commission were quite different. Uh I think that uh the whole image of the program, if there was any image, uh, had to be somehow turned around because it was something uh which certainly didn't uh carry open competition with it, which was more or less a secret for just some people.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

Transparency and openness and everything which is democratic.

SPEAKER_00 7:21

So the whole idea of uh uh making people understand that we select everyone through open competition, that it's a program where uh any networks uh don't help and it's just to know somebody. Exactly. Uh so uh that was uh one of the big challenges here in the Czech Republic. Of course, uh, the other challenge here uh was to build the name of Fulbright. In the United States, uh, being a Fulbrighter that means something, it's uh almost a household name. Fulbright program is mentioned in books and songs, and everyone knows that it means quality, and that it means that someone was selected through a thorough process to do something special. Uh, we were trying to build that image here, of course, uh, uh, from the very beginning. I just can hope that at least in the academic circles, uh, this may be the case even in the Czech Republic now. Uh, and the whole idea of open competition was not so common here, uh, certainly in the early 90s. Uh, we had to set up all uh the rules of selection, we had to set up the whole processes which uh the application uh has to go, and uh we uh in fact could uh select some of the priorities, the Fulbright Board, uh, which is the main body, uh, discussing uh the main uh ideas of the Fulbright program. It's a binational body, Czech and American, half and half. So that was discussing the priorities of the program from the very beginning. We knew that we would like to serve several goals. One of them was trying to build up some of the fields which were not in good shape in the 90s, uh, especially humanities. So, one of my big challenges at that point was to make the American side understand that it makes sense to send someone who may have graduated in a totally different field to study or do research in another field. An example of that would be people who studied at my alma mater faculty of mathematics and physics at Charles University, and several of those people then went in the field of sociology, philosophy, religious studies, and so on.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

After interviewing those Fulbright graduates of different ages, they um I found also another common nominator that even within their majors, they often shift in the areas of interest.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Yes, there were many people, especially those who uh went there uh during uh their studies, who then in some ways shifted their focus. Some of them already were thinking about shifting their focus when they were going to the US. Some of them decided to do that after their stay in the US. But in almost all the cases, I would say the people, when learning about different ways of doing research, uh, producing results, working with students, and so on, decided that they will slightly change their work, not to do it the American way, but because somehow their horizons broadened, they were able to look at the work they were doing up to the moment when they went to the US from above and figure out uh maybe some more creative ways of applying that after they came back to the Czech Republic. In most cases, the people, and I'm very happy about that, stayed in academia and many of them became important uh figures. Uh we are happy to see that uh many of the great researchers we sent over to the US became their then leaders not only in their research field, but sometimes leaders of their universities or uh in management of the universities. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

You have several deans, if I'm not mistaken, several rectors.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

We have some rectors, uh, we have lots of vice rectors uh uh within the Czech universities, and that's certainly uh something that uh makes me feel that uh in some way, even though the numbers are of course minimum compared to the number of people who work in academia here, uh, we have in some way uh achieved something even in the field of internationalization of Czech universities. Yes. The people return back, uh they work uh in their field, and they understand that going abroad is an important uh moment in the career of anyone who wants to work in academic uh fields.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

You talked about the kind of underdeveloped fields in a way affected by the politics, mainly the humanities, in the beginning of the 90s. What is the situation now? I mean, do you see a significant improvement?

SPEAKER_00 13:38

There are differences in fields not only here, it's uh the same all over the world. Uh I well understand that it's much more difficult to uh try to judge the quality uh of fields where producing uh articles is not the main aim of the researcher. There are more subtle ways how to judge how well the person is doing in some of the humanities and social sciences. Uh, the points that have been then uh the ones by which uh many researchers here are judged whether they are doing well or not in their careers cannot be applied the same way in all the fields. And I well understand that. On the other hand, uh the openness of some of the fields uh to uh being part of international science is still much larger than in the other fields.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Why is that?

SPEAKER_00 14:59

Uh I would say that uh still somehow uh uh some of the students uh in humanities and social sciences feel they are not ready to participate in international conferences to uh publish uh some parts of their work uh at an earlier stage and they wait much longer. Their role models, their mentors at the universities also have a different style of work. But now, when we are doing a selection of students from different fields, we know that if we are looking at students from hard sciences, again, let's shorten it, we can expect that those who are already studying at the PhD level would have some publications, would have several international experiences, at least in the form of conferences and so on. While with the students of humanities and social sciences, that certainly would be rather rare. On the other hand, I want to stress that the changes are enormous. You can't compare the quality that was there at the universities in the 90s with the quality now, it has grown enormously. The quality of research the universities are producing is really uncomparable to what we observed in those early stages. Research was done mainly at the Academy of Sciences, universities were there mainly to teach. So the fact that Czech universities are able to combine teaching and research and lead the students in that direction now is uh a miracle for that. Fantastic, yeah. So I am certainly not trying to be too critical about this. Again, I hope that with some of the processes, even in the teaching part, we may have helped in some ways. Uh, some of the things that are quite natural now, for example, students' voices uh uh in the uh judgment of the uh quality of uh lecturing of professors. That was something totally unknown in those years. That was groundbreaking when it started. When it brought in American professors and their requested feedback from the students, that was something totally surprising, both for the students, because they had no idea that someone would be interested in that, but uh even for the the Czech colleagues at the universities.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

What are the challenges right now, you know, after 25 years?

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Uh we concentrated uh in uh our discussion very much on the universities. But uh, what I would like to stress is that uh the Fulbright program here has many faces. Uh, you've seen that when interviewing uh the people uh who have been Fulbrighters, that it's certainly not just the people from Czech universities, but uh there are many different types of Fulbright programs uh that we have developed throughout the years, and uh some of them uh operate at the secondary school level, some of them uh try to focus on uh the non-governmental sector and so on. So the challenges uh are many, uh again, of course, and challenges are great. For us, uh, one of our challenges here within the Fulbright Commission, uh that's the fact to try to figure out which programs in which ways could help to overcome some of the current uh challenges we have here. So uh at some point when we saw uh how difficult it is for uh Czech students to uh study English in a way that would really give them uh a good competence in uh speaking and uh living in English. Uh, we tried to bring some of the young Americans to act here as English teaching assistants at Czech Secondary Schools. That's what we are doing now on a larger scale, and with the help of the Ministry of Education, we are able to bring 30 or even more of such young Americans and try to help in that. During the pandemic, this program of course had to stop. It was 30 every year, right? 30 every year every year uh at all sorts of Czech secondary school, we have these uh young Americans assisting in teaching English. Uh they will be coming again, uh hopefully, in a normal way next year. Hopefully, they will be fully assisting as they have been in the previous years. But even in the meantime, we try to utilize the experience of our English teaching assistant alumni. Uh, so for example, during this academic year, uh we put on some live lessons. Uh we broadcasted them online, we put them on Facebook, we put them on our YouTube channel, and we try to help secondary schools prepare the students of uh the graduate years uh to prepare for Maturita exam. For the A level. So for the different topics that uh uh are somehow connected with the United States, we had some of the alumni of the program uh uh working with the students here online and then broadcasting it to other schools.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

We started with an image of Fulbright, and but sometimes it seems to me it has become so prestigious. Prestages that I keep meeting, you know, young students saying, oh, Fulbright, no, I would never be able to apply for it because they would never accept me, because I'm simply, you know, not good enough. I mean, aren't you sort of a bit scared of like making it even like almost like too unachievable for the Czechs?

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Well, we are certainly trying not to do that as much as we can, and uh I uh uh certainly uh think that uh in the last months uh we may have tried to adopt some new ways of spreading this word, specific one. Uh Fulbright could be for anyone, and uh it certainly is not only for those from the best Czech university. Geniuses, geniuses, yeah, but uh it can be from for any people who put enough effort into creating a project. We are very happy to consult with people while they are putting together their applications. Uh, in the last months, uh, as we are doing uh our workshops about the different types of stipends online, uh, we think that we have been more successful in having the audience from all over the Czech Republic.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

I see, not only Prague-centered or some big city.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

We never uh are Prague centered totally. We try to do outreach at different uh universities, at different institutions within the Czech Republic, but still, uh, if we go somewhere, it means that just a few people come to listen to our workshop about how to apply and what to do and how to consult with us. We feel that the webinars we have been doing have had uh a broader impact in this sense, and because we are going to keep them online, there are more and more people who can go through them even afterwards. And uh we hope that through this uh we will show that we are approachable, that we are happy to consult even the basic stages of the ideas and maybe try to work with the people for a longer period of time than just the few months or weeks before the application deadline. There have been many people who applied once, uh didn't succeed, but may have succeeded the next year because uh they evolved the project in a way that it was successful when, for example, the foreign experts were then reviewing the application. Uh, we hope that this idea that it can be anyone who is applying, and we will try to help anyone to reach the full potential through consulting the ideas that they then put in the applications, that that uh will show that we are uh open uh to really many people and that uh we will have more applications than we have had in the previous years. I am not complaining that we don't have enough applications, but uh sure there are years it's going up and down. Uh sometimes there is no way to tell why, but uh uh there are years when it's just easier, and then there are years when it's more difficult to do the selections, but we certainly hope that uh the idea that this is just for the top elite uh uh will not be uh the main uh image of the Fulbright program because the difference in the in our programs is really enormous, and uh, with many of them, we are not uh aiming at uh the highest excellence in that field, but we may be aiming at uh the best way to help build civil society with uh some of the scholarships and so on, and it's then uh uh so wonderful to see when they come back full of that new experience, uh seeing them put it in work in uh their field. Uh, you mentioned the street worker who is now doing fantastic programs here in Prague with the kids, applying uh that experience and uh his knowledge uh uh about uh social work and about activities that could be done, and to see then the results of those who have been affected by that work is uh uh just a dream come true.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

Okay, Hanka, thank you very much for the interviews. Thank you very much for accepting the invitation, and I hope to talk to you, you know, maybe next year in the next Fulbright series. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

Thank you.