Have Money, Will Travel : Scholarships and Academic Exchange between Sweden and the United States, 1912–1980

Abstract: The large-scale transatlantic mobility of students, teachers, and researchers is a twentieth-century phenomenon that has contributed to the reshaping of international cultural, economic, and political relations into the twenty-first century. Through and as part of this development, the United States transformed into a powerful and influential country on the global stage. As a large, populous, and industrialized nation, the United States has been significant both as a funder of international mobility and as a destination for foreign students and scholars. Sweden, a small, peripheral country in Northern Europe, has had a long relationship with the United States. Amidst the mass migration of peoples from several European countries to North America in the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s, over one million Swedes migrated to the United States. The connections made through this migration, combined with the growing economic, industrial, and cultural resources of the United States, led to a renewed desire to maintain and improve relations between the two countries from the early twentieth century.This study investigates the development of scholarship programs in Sweden and the United States and their role in the academic exchange between these two countries from 1912–1980. Set against broader cultural, economic, and political processes that increased the scale and complexity of academic mobility in the twentieth century, this study explains how scholarships facilitated and structured flows of people and knowledge. The relationships between three parts of scholarship programs are analyzed: their purposes, organizational frameworks and praxis, and scholarship awards. The analysis employs three points of departure: rationales for internationalization, historical institutionalism, and symbolic capital. Annual reports and scholarship holder documentation are the two main types of sources. Annual reports were used to create a historical timeline of the purposes that drove the founding of organizations and the establishment of scholarship programs to understand the institution of scholarship-funded academic mobility in the twentieth century. Scholarship holder documentation was used to create two datasets of scholarship awards from 1912–1944 and 1945–1979, which were analyzed using descriptive statistics to find patterns and trends in scholarship awards.The results show that the scholarship programs in this study structured complex and asymmetrical flows of people and knowledge between Sweden and the United States in the twentieth century. In the first period, private foundations were the main providers of scholarships and were steered by an array of cultural, academic, and economic purposes. After World War II, and especially during the Cold War, scholarship programs were submitted to the politicization and regulation of the United States government as transatlantic academic mobility became an increasingly widespread practice. The combined and overlapping purposes that steered scholarship-awarding from 1912–1980 facilitated the rise of particular individuals, types of knowledge, higher education institutions, and industries in Sweden and the United States. In addition, the asymmetrical distribution of these scholarships, in which three times as many Swedes traveled to the United States than the reverse, gradually structured a dependence on the academic, economic, and technological resources of the United States.