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Long before his works became classics of American sociology, Talcott Parsons had spent a year as an exchange student in Heidelberg. Half a century later, when he was contemplating in an essay the enormous advances in the American system of higher education, he insisted that he could never have made the career choices he made if he had not studied at that German university in 1925. To make such choices he had had to be exposed to the still fresh memory of Max Weber and to be immersed in the profound intellectual and scholarly environment which stemmed from Weber's work.
"American standards of academic excellence," wrote Parsons in that same essay, "have largely been modeled on the best of Europe, and the influence of European scholars, not unconnected with the political disturbances in Europe, has contributed in a major way to this excellence." [1]
The American university that I come from - along with Professor Judith Friedlander - and which I originally came to as a young post-doctoral exchange Fellow, is known as The New School for Social Research, certainly contributed to what was for Parsons a uniquely American system of higher learning, a system known for its multiformity rather than conformity to one national model. In fact the division of the New School that ECEP is a part of, owes its existence, scholarly format, and social mission to a group of scholars who had fled from Nazi Germany.
The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science originated in 1933 as a response to an emergency - a rescue mission launched by The New School, which led to the establishment of the so-called "University in Exile". Here about one hundred and seventy scholars and their families found a safe haven - initially from Germany and then from many other countries of Europe. Their influence is still felt in what is now the Graduate Faculty.
One of the professors at the Graduate Faculty was Hannah Arendt, who, in a particularly inspiring way, succeeded in bridging the distance between her European - and her American - intellectual experience. Her work in political philosophy provided the intellectual agenda for an initially semi-clandestine collaboration between members of the Graduate Faculty and independent scholars in Poland and Hungary during the 1980's, which came to be known as the Democracy Seminars.
And this, in fact, is where the story of our East and Central Europe Program - and its fairly unique accumulation of experience - begins: with these so-called Democracy Seminars.
The objective of this modest enterprise was to facilitate a three-way dialogue on issues of democratic politics and culture, in the form of parallel discussions of the same books and theories, held periodically in Warsaw, Budapest, and New York, with a more or less regular exchange of findings. It was the initiator of the whole idea, Adam Michnik, who had suggested that a Budapest group be put together by Gyorgy Bence, and I am extremely happy to see that Gyorgy is with us at this conference!
On the foundation of this initially small collaborative network, the Graduate Faculty was able to launch its East and Central Europe Program in early 1990 as a response to the recent changes in the region. The original purpose of the Program was to assist regional efforts to revitalize scholarly life in the social sciences, and it was the Democracy Seminars network, expanded during the first two years of the Program to include almost all the countries of the region (including the Baltics), that has provided a uniquely personal infrastructure in which we can find the advice we need in order to plan with confidence our so-called "assistance activities".
The Democracy Seminars, by bringing together scholars and intellectuals not only interested in issues of the transition to democracy, but also genuinely committed to and involved in the process of democratization, have become for us a natural and indispensable body of advisors and first collaborators on a variety of initiatives aimed at universities. Among them have been Professors Jerzy Szacki, Marcin Krol, and Edmund Mokrzycki in Poland; Jirina Siklova, Jan Urban, and Miloslav Petrusek in the Czech Republic; Gyorgy Bence, Janos Kis, and Gyorgy Csepeli in Hungary; Martin Butora, Yvetta Radicova, and Sona Szomolyanov, in Slovakia.
Hannah Arendt, whose work was carefully examined by every chapter of the early Democracy Seminars, remains an invaluable guide for us as we re-think our work in the new democracies. I have long been struck by something Arendt says in her essay, "The Crisis in Education": "In America... education plays a different and - politically - incomparably more important role than in other countries. Technically, of course, the explanation lies in the fact that America has always been a land of immigrants... For America the determining factor has always been the motto printed on every dollar bill: Novus Ordo Seclorum, A New Order of the World." [2]
I think Hannah Arendt might agree that the processes of transformation with which the societies of Central and Eastern Europe are now grappling are also expected to lead to a certain Novus Ordo Seclorum. And I would like to suggest that the citizens of those countries are having to "immigrate", mentally as it were, not just into a new economic reality, but also into a new legal and political reality, with all the social consequences of such a move. Thus the role of education in those newly democratized societies can be compared to the role education has played in our own nation of immigrants, as described by Arendt.
If one takes Arendt's idea only metaphorically, and sees the on-going process of transformation as a process of immigration, a process of settling down into a new order - new for the whole society - one could reasonably argue (and no longer in a metaphorical mode), that education in the countries undergoing a political and economic transition "plays [or ought to play] a different and - politically - incomparably more important role than in other countries." But if education is to help the new immigrants on their journey, it had better be on deck for the first sailing.
When we at the New School were getting ready in late 1989 to launch our East and Central Europe Program - now acting officially, above ground - we knew that dealing with the so-called "region" did not mean dealing with a uniform system. No matter how critical and urgent the situation may have been in the universities of our original five countries, their needs and capacities were not identical. In Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, the intellectual losses varied. In some countries - especially Poland and Hungary, but also, in its more liberal periods, Czechoslovakia - academia had served as an island of relative freedom. The long tradition of independent thinking represented by such great teachers, sociologists, and philosophers as Lukacs, Czarnowski, Mukarovsky, Ossowski, and Kula was first nurtured more or less openly by their own students, and then it influenced, in turn, whole generations of students. Under frequently hostile circumstances, serious research nevertheless took place (alongside much that was approved but of questionable value) and new unsanctioned forms of teaching were tested.
There is also a quite widespread opinion (one with which I am sure you are familiar) about the political role of academia in the late seventies and eighties. The notion that academia generated, sponsored, or promoted the revolution and was one of its key habitats is borne out most fully in Poland and Hungary. It was this community that launched flying universities, private seminars, and underground presses and publishing houses. Here, certainly, the academic milieu in its broadest Eastern European sense - which includes scholars and intellectuals, students and artists - was crucial in generating ideas for changing the system. It is a bitter paradox that this very milieu was hit so severely in the years following 1989.
It is useful for anyone doing work in the region to realize what a very complex and unexpected role the universities - or academia in general - were performing prior to 1989. This is especially important, perhaps, for the Americans, who were always quick to conclude that all aspects of social life had been uniformly repressed in all those countries, and who have therefore tended to look down with a certain liberal condescension from their metropolitan heights as if upon the intellectual provinces. But that differences exist was probably no news to the Europeans, or to the Germans in particular, who had a chance to see the situation at close hand.
If we look closely at the state of the universities in Central Europe before they were to embark on their journey into the new world order, one can discern, among other differences - particularly in Poland and Hungary - a range of secondary but important social functions vis a vis those scholars who were uncomfortable with the status quo.
In the first place, the university provided a relatively safe playground for those who were mildly unorthodox politically, for those who wanted to flirt with the opposition and with revolution, but within safe limits. It also functioned as a refuge for those who were unable to fit in anywhere else because of their moral and political commitments.
Sometimes it served as a place of exile for those who, while occupying leading positions, had committed political misdemeanors or had caused some problems for the regime.
It is also useful to remember that in societies in which the pursuit of careers in public life was reserved for those who were in or very close to the nomenklatura, academic careers began to function for many as a substitute for other careers. The very decision to enter academia often indicated a conscious refusal to take part in official political life. It was just as often a desire for precisely the kind of protective umbrella that academia provided.
But within two years of the great turning point of 1989, when the regime, with its whole system of restrictions and rewards, ceased to exist, academia had lost not only its excitements and prestige, but also its main provider of resources to support teaching and research. Now that new opportunities for careers in public life were opening up, these "refugees" to academia were returning home: to parliament, government, the media, business, and above-ground publishing. Adding to this internal brain drain were the talented and energetic young people already teaching at the universities who were leaving to take their chances in the market economy. And many promising graduates were not choosing academic careers in the first place. It looked as though this revolution, too, may be "devouring its own children".
Our long-standing awareness of the region's intellectual capital, the dynamic and multifaceted situation of academia in the four countries we are looking at today, and the constant feedback we were getting from our long-time colleagues there, compelled us - early on in the process - to re-think traditional approaches to academic assistance and support.
Initially, in the early nineties, we decided to work directly with small groups of committed scholars who we knew were interested in acting on behalf of their departments or faculties, rather than to work through large university administrations, with their poor record of accountability. Perhaps we were also under the influence of our earlier mode of unofficial (or semi-clandestine) collaboration, which - of necessity - had depended on the commitment of "private citizens" rather than on the indulgence of any authorities. Obviously we were also nervous then that the changes so necessary in the social sciences could meet - if not political - then bureaucratic resistance. So we preferred to regard the universities as civil societies and, at least in the early stages, work through their "citizen scholars".
During this initial period, from 1990 to 1992, we chose to become active participants in preparing the curricular restructuring that was about to begin in the social sciences. At the New School we were fortunate that through the New York branch of the Democracy Seminars we had cultivated a strong group of American scholars who were eager to meet their counterparts in the region. And so, with the help of our European colleagues, we established in each country a so-called Curriculum Center - usually affiliated with, and located on the premises of, a social science faculty and run by energetic faculty members. A major purpose was to disseminate teaching materials, sets of syllabi, books, and manuals for each of the various sub-disciplines. These centers, which became nodes of innovation, also hosted a series of bibliographic seminars and curriculum workshops, at which American and local sociologists, political scientists, or political philosophers discussed the curricula of their respective universities, the most recent literature in their respective fields, and approaches to teaching. This early curriculum assistance laid the groundwork for a more advanced form of cooperation in 1992-95: what we initially called the Visiting Courses and later the Collaborative Courses.
The Collaborative Courses project pointed to a new kind of mutuality, with greater parity, in the relationships the New School was developing with academic institutions in Central Europe. The Collaborative Courses, conducted in Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague, were designed and co-taught by regional and Graduate Faculty scholars with the objective of introducing new courses into the social science curriculum. They required meticulous joint planning. Usually during the fall semester the work on the syllabi was completed, the course readings were purchased in New York and shipped to the participating university or faculty libraries, and the visits of the New School professors were scheduled. Typically, in the course of the spring semester, four of the thirteen classes were conducted by visiting New School professors.
Now please forgive me if I indulge in numbers. The Graduate Faculty is a small institution, and so the numbers are small, but we believe they carry some weight. Up until the end of 1995 we have developed collaboratively-taught courses at six universities in the region, which have reached three hundred graduate students directly and involved twenty-one visiting lecturers from the United States and Western Europe. The courses have become a permanent part of the curriculum at these institutions.
The Collaborative Courses were just one of our projects which, because of their highly interactive character, helped to transform the East and Central Europe Program, originally conceived as a program of informed assistance, into the busy hub of a whole variety of joint initiatives, creating a common teaching and learning environment for senior faculty, junior scholars, and graduate students from - as of now - 14 countries of the region and the United States.
For example, with a growing conviction that there has been considerable convergence in the kinds of questions that are most pressing in the structuring of democratic societies both East and West, Working Groups were established to deal with research and policy problems of common interest. The topics of the groups have included Political Parties and Party Systems in Central Europe, Ethnicity and Citizenship, The Status of Women and the Tradition of the Women's Movement, and Social Memory of the Recent Past.
We have also succeeded in expanding our reach to the young generation of scholars who are just entering professional academic life, including them in a systematic way in our collaborative projects. We consider this particularly important since there is still enormous pressure on the best university graduates in all countries to choose the better-paying business world.
Another way in which we have reached out to the younger generation is through our Summer Graduate Institute, called Democracy and Diversity, and held annually in Cracow - this past summer for the fourth time. This intensive three-week program brings East European and American graduate students together to explore, in rigorous academic fashion, the problems of democracy, nationalism, religious conflict, and gender. The seminars - frequently co-taught by American and Central European faculty - are designed to give interested young Americans direct exposure to the region and its people, and to introduce the latter to both new curricular topics and the American approach to graduate teaching.
The Cracow Institute also gives us an opportunity to select doctoral students and junior university teachers to come on one-year Fellowships to the Graduate Faculty, most of them on our so-called Democracy Fellowships.
All our activities so far have been aimed at building relationships - by facilitating debate on issues of democracy and democratization through the Democracy Seminars, by offering direct curricular support through the Curriculum Centers, and later by developing the Collaborative Courses, encouraging joint research projects, and establishing the summer institute in Cracow; and all these activities prepared the ground for morefully developed partnerships with both institutions and groups of individuals.
Such partnerships form the context within which we are working this year and for the foreseeable future, as I shall now explain.
But where are we now, and where are our friends, in this sixth year of their journey into the 'New Order', the Novus Ordo?
It seems to me that the initial internal brain drain has stopped, or at least slowed down a great deal, and that many accomplished scholars and teachers, after brief stints in politics or the marketplace, are coming back, though not always giving up public life altogether. This is encouraging, but what has been even more exciting for us to observe is that new, independent, reform-oriented, and imaginatively conceived academic institutions, such as the German/Polish Viadrina University in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, have been springing up all over the region.
Whether marked by the creation of new faculties at long-established universities, such as the Faculty of Social Science at Prague's Charles University, or the establishment of entirely new centers of learning, as in the case of the Graduate School of Social Research in Warsaw, the region is today approaching a situation in which the number of reform-minded, forward-looking institutions has just about reached a critical mass.
We at the New School call them "beacon institutions". These are either new, flexible, and non-bureaucratic institutions which are trying to establish new patterns of working, or older ones which have become much more independent from the old structures of academic instruction and research and much more interested in implementing new methods. They are led and staffed by talented scholars who, in spite of tight budgets and difficult circumstances, are reshaping the intellectual maps of their countries.
I would also like to mention these other beacon institutions: Academia Istropolitana in Bratislava, New Bulgarian University in Sofia, Kiev-Mohyla Academy in Kiev, Ukraine, the Ethnic Minorities Program at ELTE in Budapest, and of course the Central European University with its campuses in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw. It is with institutions of this kind that we have been cultivating relationships and are now entering into more formal partnerships.
In this new context of fully reciprocal relationships, the most recent forms of our continuing curricular activities are what we call the Teaching Partnerships and Junior Teaching Initiatives.
The Teaching Partnerships usually involve two professors each, one from the United States and one from the region, who create a new course together, based both on their shared scholarly interest and on the curricular needs of their respective home institutions. This type of collaboration, a refinement of the earlier Collaborative Courses in that it entails genuine co-authorship, changes the dynamics of collaboration, contributes to the intellectual development of both collaborators, and benefits their respective institutions equally. One such course, called Democracy: Between Ideal and Reality, was conducted at our summer institute in Cracow by Jeffrey Goldfarb and Marcin Krol,
The Junior Teaching Initiatives is a new project designed to bring into our collaborative teaching (and research) activities the younger generation of talented scholars from the region, people who are on the threshold of academic careers. We believe that including them early on in a program like this will not only facilitate their professional growth, but also provide them with the reassurance that comes from being members of a broader international network of scholars. This very real sense of community is forged by their shared experience of working at the Graduate Faculty and further reinforced by their participation in the variety of activities which the East and Central Europe Program conducts in the region.
The prospective junior teachers are selected from a group of advanced graduate students who come to the Graduate Faculty from the region on one-year pre-doctoral Fellowships arranged by "ECEP". While advancing their Ph.D. projects, taking courses, and participating in ECEP activities, each Fellow also works closely with his/her faculty advisor to develop a new course. Each course, which will be introduced to the curriculum of the home university upon the Fellow's return, is typically a mix of the Fellow's interests, the advisor's area of expertise, and the home university's needs.
The readings for the course are then shipped to the university library. Of course, the feasibility of each such teaching initiative is determined - and support for it at the Fellow's home university is ensured - early on in the process.
For example, we had a promising young sociologist from Budapest with us last year on a Democracy Fellowship, whose Ph.D. thesis examines the situation of the Roma in Hungary. While at the New School he worked with the Graduate Faculty sociologist Terry Williams on the preparation of a course entitled, Race and Ethnicity in Theory and Ethnography: the Case of the Roma in Hungary, a course which he will introduce to his faculty's curriculum at ELTE University in the spring. Professor Williams, an African-American and an authority on the sociology of race and ethnicity, will join the course in Budapest to give a series of lectures on the theory and methodology of such studies.
And now there is something I would like to make very clear, if it has not already become obvious. These past five years have had a growing impact on our own life and work at the Graduate Faculty and on the whole New School community and its broader New York public. Our regular series of public lectures, for example, by scholars and public figures from the region, has helped to make the New School, and in particular the Graduate Faculty, a leading center for informed discussion about the processes taking place in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. More importantly, the dialogue we have fostered has profoundly influenced and enriched our own thinking about society - and not just about society in the region, but about our own as well.
Speaking for colleagues in the Departments of Political Science and Sociology, Professor David Plotke has written to us of their work with the East and Central Europe Program: "That work has helped us think about democracy, nationalism, political culture, and a number of other theoretical issues in new ways. Through contact with the political realities of East and Central Europe over the last decade and through links with intellectual and political figures in those countries, many of us have not only learned a great deal about developments in those countries but have been encouraged to rethink our views on many questions of politics and theory."
The impact on us in New York of our collaborative involvement in the region and of the gradual shift toward full partnership finds its most concrete expression in the Graduate Faculty's launching last year of a new department called the Committee for the Study of Democracy, which draws on both Graduate Faculty scholars and our international network of colleagues, particularly from Eastern Europe and Latin America. The central themes of this integrated program include the foundations of democracy and rights; processes of democratization, including the collapse of dictatorships, liberalization, reform, revolutions, and negotiated transitions; democratic decision making; modes of democratic political action and citizenship; and other forms of participation in pluralistic societies. In our freedom-loving country it is rare - even in the universities - to have democracy treated as a discipline! But so far the new department has been generating a lively interest among our graduate students.
In addition, following a pilot project in which Adam Michnik conducted a six-week seminar at the Graduate Faculty last year, we have formally launched a new series of Visiting Professorships in Democracy for scholars and public intellectuals from the emerging democracies. Our first guest was the South African philosopher and poet, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and in the spring 1996 semester we are having with us the highly respected ethnologist and human rights activist, member of the Russian Duma from, Galina Starovoitova. This initiative of the East and Central Europe Program complements the work of the Committee for the Study of Democracy in exciting ways.
In yet another project, together with several institutions around the world that are very much like the Graduate Faculty, including one in Poland and one in Germany, we are designing joint doctoral degree programs, in which Ph.D. dissertations would be supervised by joint committees and the doctorates would be awarded by both partner institutions. Members of the joint-degree committees would be colleagues who had already been long involved in Collaborative Courses, Teaching Partnerships, or Working Groups. Dean Judith Friedlander may like to tell you more about this project.
And of course, the Democracy Seminars - where all of this began - continue to provide a forum for discussion on issues of the transition to democracy, both locally throughout the year and at their joint meetings held annually at different sites throughout the region. In the Spring of 1996, marking the tenth anniversary of the Seminars, a collection of the essays they generated will be published in English under the title, Grappling with Democracy: Deliberations on Post-Communist Societies 1990-95.
Since we are deeply aware of our own debt to the great thinkers and writers of Central and Eastern Europe - and of our debt to every young student who comes to join us for a semester or two and share his or her insights with us, I hope we may be permitted to take some pride in the belief that our work in the region in the field of higher education, carefully tailored to the changing needs of each country, is also contributing to regional efforts to understand and manage the stresses of societal transformation.
Perhaps even more importantly, we have created a kind of common intellectual environment in which scholars young and old from all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe can meet and get to know each other.
No matter how distant and idealized the Novus Ordo Seclorum may be, our coming together is itself a very special journey that has been undertaken in various ways by Hannah Arendt, by Michnik and Bence and Kis and Butora, by Claus Offe and Ulrich Preuss, by young instructors from the Dresden University of Technology or the Academia Istropolitana, and - increasingly, now - by students from Latvia, Ukraine, Armenia, who have been given the chance - like Talcott Parsons - to be normal exchange students - and in a - let us hope - somewhat less divided world.
***
Footnotes
1. Talcott Parsons, "Some Considerations on the Growth of the American System of Higher Education and Research", [in] Culture and Its Creators, ed. J. Ben-David and T.N. Clark, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1977.
2. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, Penguin Books, 1993:
Chapter 5, "The Crisis in Education", p.175.
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