"Americans live to work while Australians work to live. You need to stop working so hard and learn more about the rest of the world."

So said an Australian Fulbright Scholar from Caltech in one of several recent public forums organized by the Visiting Fulbright Scholar Enrichment Program at UCLA for Southern California.

The events of Sept. 11 made it clear to me as the coordinator of the program that beyond the cultural enrichment programs we organize to introduce visiting scholars to Southern California, we need to create opportunities for them to be heard by wider audiences. The goal was for Americans to try to understand how the United States is perceived abroad — to get some inkling of how others see us.

Our forums this year have been a post-Sept. 11 Honors Seminar at UCLA, featuring Fulbright Scholars speaking about perceptions of America in their countries, and two panel discussions in the community. I hoped that cultural insights and revelations would happen when firsthand discussion with the Fulbright Scholars challenged existing stereotypes or absence of information — and they did.

When a Japanese scholar at a seminar at Occidental College spoke about reactions to Sept. 11, she told us her countrymen were hurt to learn that Americans equated the event with Pearl Harbor while the Japanese compared it to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When a UCLA Fulbright Scholar from Yemen spoke, many students learned for the first time where Yemen is from a Muslim who is a distinguished professor of Islamic art and architecture.

In a panel discussion in Pacific Palisades, a scholar from Ghana talked about the mixed feelings of his countrymen toward the United States. The government needs U.S. financial aid and that of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, but sometimes these ties are seen as a new form of Western colonialism. "There is a fine line between too much closeness and not enough," the scholar said.

A Korean Fulbright Scholar in English and comparative English at UC Irvine explained that "older people still feel solidarity with America because of your aid after the Korean War, but younger people resent your having helped to squash an uprising for democracy on May 18, 1980, by allowing the Korean army to have their way. That broke the ideal of American democracy and so did Bush's 'axis of evil' speech." He continued, "The U.S. is perceived as arrogant and too powerful. As someone who has studied your literature and spent many years in this country, I see America ironically as more powerful than it has ever been, but also more anxious and vulnerable."

"In Bulgaria our prime minister is an ex-king who was in exile for 15 years, and our president is a former Communist boss," said a Bulgarian scholar in film at USC. "Bulgarians dream of American democracy, but sometimes you present a confusing picture. ... We did not like it when you bombed Yugoslavia." She concluded her remarks with a plea to all Americans: "We believe in your democracy. Please don't let us down."

Kerr coordinates the Visiting Fulbright Scholar Program at UCLA for Southern California.