ORANGE : E. Europeans Pay Visit to Chapman

Ladislav Kabat, a Czechoslovakian university official visiting Chapman College on Monday, put it bluntly.

“We passed through huge political change,” he said, referring to the peaceful removal of the Communist Party from its leadership role in Czechoslovakia. “Now is the more difficult thing: the economy.”

Kabat and five other Eastern European education leaders have these challenges in mind this month as they explore college campuses across the country.

The officials hold jobs equivalent to that of a chancellor or college president, but they say that they are now students, taking a quick-study course in the way decisions are made at U.S. colleges. The lessons are intended to help their nations move toward increased political and economic freedom.

“People are impatient,” Kabat said, referring to the lower standard of living in Czechoslovakia. “They would like to see some positive economic change (but) it cannot be done immediately.”

Chapman was chosen as one stop on the three-week tour because of its work in forecasting the regional economy, said conference organizer David Hake of the University of Tennessee.

Other schools on the U.S. Information Agency-sponsored tour are also actively engaged in the economies of their areas, such as Indiana University and the University of Utah.

During a meeting Monday with the board of trustees at Chapman, educators from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania described some of the changes at their schools as the result of the revolutionary shift away from communism in recent months.

They told about the elimination of economics programs that once taught only Marxist-Leninist theory and the removal of statues honoring the Communist regime. Kabat described his first task when named to head the University of Nitra in Czechoslovakia as firing 60 of his colleagues because their Marxist-Leninist philosophies.

“All these theories fail totally,” he said, adding that the professors “were not able to help us in our society. They failed as persons.”

Ljubomir Lilov of Sofia University in Bulgaria said: “Our greatest new problem is the equipment. It is very difficult to teach computer sciences when you have no computers. The instructional level is as high as in this country, but the facilities are in another world.”

Ionel Haiduc, the rector of the largest university in the Transylvanian section of Romania, said he was amazed by the college library systems and computer facilities in this country.

“We are trying now to adapt,” Haiduc said. “We have the time and the determination.”