This page was created by Carrie Pirmann. The last update was by Aung Pyae Phyo.
Decline and Change - Conferences and Colloquies
On 2 March 1962, the Burmese military took power of Burma through a coup d’état and started restricting people from travelling out of the country. It is interesting to note that this happened the night before the Burma-Bucknell Weekend of the academic year 1961-1962 started.
According to pamphlets made for the occasion, this was the last Burma-Bucknell Weekend that boasted an impressive list of Burmese students who came for the occasion. The following year, that number dropped down to a total of seven students, only one of whom was an undergraduate student.
1963 also marked other troubles, such as the drying up of funds provided by the Asia Foundation for the event and the difficulty of finding speakers to give talks. The Christian Association had known for a while that the Asia Foundation would have to stop supporting them, and plans were made to manage the costs beforehand. The planning committee’s difficulties in finding a speaker due to needing someone who was not involved in politics or government, to keep the program focused on the theme of cultural exchange.
The program still had broad support, from the State Department and the Burmese government.
In addition, tension between the Voice of America, the Burmese Embassy, and the Department of State developed due to the situation in Burma. In planning the last few Burma-Bucknell Weekends, Forrest D Brown’s correspondence notes that there were concerns that the staff of the Voice of America would cause discomfort by asking for statements on Burma from the representatives of the countries.
To preserve the Burma-Bucknell Weekends in some shape or form, the organizing committee attempted to keep the name but have the topics addressed by the speakers shift from being about Burma to being about Southeast Asia. In 1966, a revised attempt at the Burma-Bucknell Weekends saw the name of the Weekend was also changed to “Conference on the People’s Republic of China in the Sixties.” Notes from the Christian Association note that financing was only possible through the contribution of student clubs and organizations. This proved to be a successful change, and in the following year, another conference was held on India, and in the next year, a conference on United Nations was held. The conferences were still difficult to host, and the Christian Association, by that time, had changed its name to Commitment and Action. They also changed the conferences, and in 1969, they held the first International Colloquy, on the topic of International Student Crisis: Mandate for Change. This Colloquy was meant to be a combination of all the international weekends they had before.
The fact that the Burma-Bucknell Weekends held on with new names and new topics, yet still strove to hold on to the ideal of a cultural exchange shows two things. The first one is that the long-held view of the Weekends being stopped due to political unrest was not entirely true. While the number of student guests decreased, the weekends still held onto their original form for four more years after the coup, and then was a standalone event for three more years before being merged with any other program.
The second shows the dedication of Bucknell in continuing the relationship despite the challenges it faced. The financial troubles and the political unrest did not deter the University from keeping the weekends alive, and they made a point every year to mention the Burma-Bucknell Weekends in the information given out about the conferences. It was only when they started the colloquies that the Weekends were not specifically mentioned, but even then, the intent was the same: to have a cultural exchange with international guests over a topic of interest.
