Professor awarded prestigious Fulbright honor

CANTON — Alan L. Draper has been awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair position for next year.

The St. Lawrence University government professor will use the award to do research and teach at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He is the first from St. Lawrence to receive the award since at least 1987, according to Institute for International Education officials, the federal group that oversees the Fulbright program. Older records were not available Thursday.

“We’ve had quite a few Fulbright scholars over the years,” university spokeswoman Macreena A. Doyle said. “I think Alan is the first on our faculty to receive the distinguished chair. They really do only award 30 to 40 distinguished chairs a year, and there are all kinds of qualifications you have to meet to even apply.”

The distinguished chair awards are one of the most prestigious positions in the Fulbright program. The grantees must be “eminent scholars and have a significant publication and teaching record,” according to the Fulbright Scholars Program Web site.

Every year, 800 American professors and researchers are sent overseas with the Fulbright Program. However, no more than 40 of them are given the distinguished chair award.

Mr. Draper has been teaching at SLU for almost 30 years and has served two terms as head of the government department. He has written or co-written several books about the civil rights movement as well as comparative and national politics.

He will spend next year’s spring semester in Austria, a country he’s never been to and whose language he does not speak.

“It’s not only a university town, but it’s also a tourist town, so my suspicion is that English is pretty prevalent,” said Mr. Draper, whose wife will accompany him. “I don’t think there will be a problem with students or non-university people as far as the language challenge.”

While in Innsbruck, Mr. Draper will teach two political science classes and do his own research about immigrant populations and ethnic niches.

“Each ethnic group (in the U.S.) is able to capture a niche in the market, through which they become socially mobile,” he said, noting that Jews concentrated their efforts in textiles, South Asians in the hotel business, and Koreans in New York City became entrepreneurs with small grocery stores.

“There’s been a lot of immigration into Austria and my research will be whether these immigrants have captured similar niches through which to become socially mobile,” he said.

Though Mr. Draper is the first to be named a distinguished chair, he is by no means the first north country professor to be a Fulbright scholar.

Over the 2009-10 school year, four north country professors are overseas with the program, two from SUNY Potsdam and one each from Clarkson University, Potsdam, and St. Lawrence, according to the Fulbright Web site.