Universities in Eastern Europe, U.S. Form Educational Alliance

Five Eastern European universities and four colleges in the United States will announce a pioneering educational alliance today designed to strengthen ties between their faculties and students and provide technical resources for both education and economic change in Eastern Europe.

The creation of the consortium, whose membership includes Chapman College in Orange County, is scheduled to be announced at a news conference at the United Nations and concludes a three-week U.S. tour by top educators from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland and Romania.

The alliance will be formally named the Consortium of Higher Education for Democracy and will concentrate not only on exchanges of students and professors, but on joint projects as well.

The announcement follows a fact-finding visit by the delegation of educational leaders to Chapman, the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Indiana University in Bloomington and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

James L. Doti, director of business forecasting and an economics professor at Chapman, said: “They (the Eastern European educators) will be responsible for educating a new cadre, a new generation of managers” for market economies. “They are at a point in the evolution of their academic institutions where they are simply exploding.”

The change in Eastern Europe has been so rapid that members of the delegation expressed immediate interest in obtaining American textbooks without waiting for translations.

“They want these books now,” Doti said.

Eastern European participants are Sofia University in Bulgaria; Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj- Napoca, Romania; the Agricultural University in Nitra, Czechoslovakia; Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest, Hungary, and Warsaw University in Poland.

Goldman reported from New York and Lindgren from Orange County.