By Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy (former Professor of Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch)

I was awarded a Harkness Fellowship by the UK Harkness Committee in 1969. This funded me for 21 months as a PhD student in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So I am hardly typical of Harkness beneficiaries resident in New Zealand today! Even so, I hope that what I say about my experience may strike a chord with other past or potential Fellows.

New Zealanders and British people have the English language in common with Americans. It can therefore be a shock to discover how far our cultures diverge. As a condition of my fellowship I was required to spend three months travelling around the USA.

I still have the diary I kept during that adventure. On 11 June 1970 I arrived by bus in Natchez, Mississippi. As I carried my rucksack on my way to a motel, a man stopped me in the street and asked me where I was from. On hearing that I was from London, he told me his son had married an English girl there. He understood that London was a large and impressive city. Why, then, had I come to Natchez? The notion of travel to broaden the mind was strange to him.

The next day I was stopped again by an intensely suspicious policeman. Hearing that I was studying at MIT did nothing to allay his suspicions. No doubt he recalled that, only a month earlier, two students had been shot dead by police at a college in the state capital, Jackson, while demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Eventually, however, my accent persuaded him that I was harmless.

The distinction between the USA’s coastal states (such as New York and California) and the ‘fly-over country’ between them is familiar. Alongside that is the attitude displayed by a fellow-student at MIT, who was horrified to hear that I was planning to visit some southern states during my bus trip.

For her, ‘the South’ seemed not merely culturally alien but also physically dangerous. Events of recent years should remind potential Harkness Fellows that the United States of America are united only in legal terms—and even that unity is perhaps now precarious.