In 1921, Raymond Watson Kirkbride was a young University of Delaware professor with a radical vision: sending American university students to France for their junior year. Three quarters of a century later, his idea endures; every year, colleges and universities all over the United States send thousands of students on study abroad programs.
The man behind the Delaware Foreign Study Plan (which came to be known as the Junior Year Abroad) came to the University of Delaware after having served in France as part of the Evacuation Ambulance Corps. No. 10. After the Armistice was declared, Kirkbride was sent to the University of Grenoble, where he studied French language and culture. Shortly after returning home, in 1919, Hullihen was hired by the University of Delaware as an assistant professor of modern languages. He had been teaching for almost two years when he approached the University's president with a radical new idea.
President Hullihen might well have thrown the young instructor out of his office for proposing that students be sent 'away' from the University. Instead, Hullihen endorsed the Delaware Foreign Study Plan, and recruited support for it - including the approval of then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and philanthropist Pierre Samuel du Pont. Kirkbride returned to France to make the arrangements, and, in the fall of 1923, the First Foreign Study Group sailed for Europe.
Kirkbride accompanied the first five foreign study groups, but became ill and was forced to return to the United States. On February 18, 1929, the ailing Kirkbride was awarded the cross of the Legion of Honor by French authorities. According to the Baltimore Sun, the cross was awarded "in recognition of [Kirkbride's] work to advance Franco-American friendship by organization of the foreign study group of the University."
On March 1, 1929, Kirkbride died.
A year after his death, the University of Delaware's Review memorialized Kirkbride as a young man with a great vision:
The originator [of the Plan] has passed away, but by present indications, the work will continue to grow, and his name will always be associated with it...As we remember that this important international education project was started by a young man of but 36 years of age, we feel it should lend encouragement to the youth of our nation now studying in our colleges and universities.
