Professor Hopes to Contribute to New Lithuania : CSUN: Anthropology professor Liucija Baskauskas has been invited to develop humanities offerings at a revived university. She would be vice chancellor for a year.

A Cal State Northridge professor, carried out of Russian-occupied Lithuania in her father’s arms 46 years ago, is preparing to return to her homeland to help rebuild the academic program at a university closed in 1950 by the Soviets.

Professor Liucija (pronounced “Lutzia”) Baskauskas, an anthropology professor at CSUN since 1972, has been asked to develop the Lithuanian university’s undergraduate curriculum. She hopes to leave later this month and stay a full year.

“It’s so exciting,” said Baskauskas, 47. “We’ve been asked to help humanize the humanities. . . . We’ve got to re-establish logic, philosophy--the things that we assume everyone has.”

Vytautas the Great University in Kaunas, named for a 14th-Century monarch, started offering classes to about 180 students last fall just as Lithuania began to push for liberation from Soviet rule. The goal is to enroll 1,000 students in four years, Baskauskas said.

After the university’s closure, scientific, medical and theological studies lived on in other institutions in Kaunas, but instruction in most of the humanities disappeared altogether.

It is a particular challenge, Baskauskas said, to reintroduce the free ideals of the liberal arts into a country largely isolated from the West for more than 40 years. Art history scholars have never seen Rome, she said, anthropologists have been confined to studying bones, and until last year, historians were prevented from reading pre-Soviet history of Lithuania.

“We’re really talking about major distortion . . . and they have not had the access to the basic materials, like contemporary maps,” she said. “We’re really starting from ground zero.”

After receiving encouragement from Lithuanian officials during an organizing visit last spring, she was shocked two weeks ago to be informed that her visa request was frozen as part of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s recent sanctions against Lithuania in retaliation for its March 11 declaration of independence.

“I think Gorbachev is a brilliant politician, I really do,” she said. “But I’m appalled that he would limit and exclude educational and cultural exchanges at this time.”

A visa delay may force her to postpone a Baltic Family conference in Kaunas planned for mid-May. But the setback has not dampened her hopes of spending a year in the central Lithuanian city as the university’s vice chancellor.

Baskauskas is one of several academics of Lithuanian descent who want to improve opportunities for young Lithuanians and help define what the country will become--through conferences, cultural and academic exchanges and through the university’s offerings. Four professors are at the Kaunas university now. They are from Yale University, St. Xavier College in Chicago, Trent University in Canada and Oberlin College in Ohio. Four more have agreed to run a summer business session and up to 10 more are expected in the fall.

Baskauskas sees herself as a cultural broker, she said, because of her fluency in Lithuanian--which she spoke with her parents--and her intimate knowledge of life and culture in both countries. She lived in Lithuania from 1977 to 1978.

“I’m not going to be Pollyanna,” she said. “I’m going in there knowing that I’ll be waiting in line with everybody else, washing clothes by hand, bringing my own medical supplies, my own Band-Aids.”

The foreign faculty members must carefully straddle the line between subtly advising their Lithuanian colleagues of advances in their fields and appearing chauvinistic about democracy, she said. Westerners can learn something from their Eastern counterparts, too, she said.

“I see the strength of the people there, too. Experiencing such loss, such terror, has honed their humanity in different ways,” she said. “We have experienced the everyday joy of freedom to the point where we don’t even know it’s there.”

This is a pilgrimage of sorts for Baskauskas, who was born in Mariyampole (modern-day Kapsukas), a small city southwest of Kaunas. In 1944, when she was not yet 2 years old, her parents received permission to leave the country for the weekend and never returned.

They headed for the safety of Dresden, then considered the Paris of Germany, only to witness its devastation by British bombs less than a year later. The family lived in several refugee camps in Europe before coming to Louisiana in 1949, where her father cut sugar cane.

“It was the typical immigrant story,” she said.

As she grew up, her parents always talked about returning to Lithuania for good, as if it were a certainty. But Baskauskas’ first foray back to her roots didn’t come until 1977, when research in cultural anthropology renewed her interest in Lithuania. She applied to study Lithuanian wedding traditions through a young faculty exchange program run by the International Research Exchange Board, now based at Princeton University.

It was a long shot because at that time academics were being allowed only into the major Soviet cities. But Baskauskas proceeded as if barriers did not exist, subletting her Santa Monica beach house, arranging time off from CSUN and packing. Two weeks before she was scheduled to leave, her proposal was approved by the Soviets.

Once in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, she encountered relatives who had never left the region, including a cousin who was the same age and shared her blond hair and her ice-blue eyes. It was almost like looking into a mirror, she said, except that the lack of medical care and the wear and tear of a more Spartan life had added 10 years to her cousin’s appearance.

The women there worked unbelievably long days, she said, reknitting the wool from too-small sweaters into larger ones and rushing out at dawn to wait in lines to buy cucumbers or other delicacies.

“It makes me very appreciative of what we have . . . of having a fresh salad, new clothes,” she said, “but also very conscious of our excess.”

When she made another trip to Lithuania 11 years later--last spring--to help plan the university’s rebirth, the ravages of the environment and of Lithuanian society seemed especially stark, she said. The shallow Baltic Sea had become seriously polluted, birth defects and abortions were rumored to be widespread, and women like her cousin were struggling harder than ever to provide a decent life for their families.

“I was so devastated by the negative changes since I’d been there,” she said.

Those problems inspired her and colleagues in Lithuania and Sweden to organize the conference on the Baltic Family, set for May 15-18. Topics include the environment, culture, politics, economics and the arts--all with an eye toward uniting the Baltic countries by seeking solutions to common problems.

If the expected 65 foreign participants do not receive visas by Tuesday, the conference will be rescheduled for October.

Wooing Western academics to help mold the university began with an international conference held at Communist Party headquarters in Kaunas last year. Baskauskas was there along with representatives of 16 other institutions, including Harvard and UCLA.

They came up with guidelines aimed at expanding the university’s scope: Most classes would be taught in English, and students would spend a year studying abroad; half the faculty would be imported from other countries, and all faculty members would agree to train and advise a native graduate student in their field.

Besides agreeing to return this year to develop curriculum, Baskauskas was asked to screen students for admission and help build a library collection.

Recently back from a sabbatical in England and Sweden, Baskauskas is patching together some remaining sabbatical and vacation time to spend the year in Kaunas. She will take along her two younger children--Vasara, 8, and Vejas, 11--whose Lithuanian names mean “summer” and “wind” respectively.

Her husband, artist and Santa Monica College instructor Stephen Anaya, plans to teach part of the year at the art institute in neighboring Vilnius.

If the visa to leave in May is not granted in time, Baskauskas said, she will push even harder for visas for herself and her family to leave in June.

As in 1977, she appears undaunted. Once again, her house is filled with half-packed boxes, she has informed the university of her intended absence, and she has not arranged for her children’s usual summer tennis lessons.

“I am very optimistic,” she said.