ORANGE : Polish Educator Is Graduation Speaker

In his first U.S. visit since the announcement of a new academic alliance between five East European and four U.S. universities, Warsaw University President Andrzej K. Wroblewski told Chapman College graduates on Sunday that communism is dead as a major political system.

“In Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other countries, communism is over, and it is about to end in the Soviet Union,” Wroblewski said. “There are still a few isolated strongholds . . . but their time is short.”

But in his 15-minute commencement address, the president of the largest university in Poland also warned the 589 graduates that they will face a much greater crisis than the spread of totalitarianism: the destruction of rain forests and thousands of species of animal and plant life each year.

Wroblewski said that by the end of the next century, more than half of the estimated 10 million species existing today will have vanished. He exhorted graduating student to begin solving the environmental crisis.

“Compared with many thousand of years, which were the scale of previous extinctions,” such as the period of time it took for the dinosaurs to disappear, Wroblewski said, “our present mass extinction is almost instantaneous. It is caused by us and is due mainly to the destruction of tropical forests.”

Wroblewski’s speech was delivered before 114 master’s degrees and 475 bachelor’s degrees were handed out by Chapman College’s new president, Allen E. Koenig, at the college’s 129th commencement ceremony.

The Rev. Robert H. Schuller, whose daughter Gretchen Penner received her bachelor’s degree in sociology, gave the short invocation before the ceremony began. Coincidentally, Schuller, who is pastor of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, earlier in the day had broadcast his second Hour of Power sermon to the Soviet Union, asking for more communication and unity between the East and West.

After the commencement, Wroblewski and Koenig said that an October organizational meeting is scheduled in Budapest, Hungary, for representatives of the newly formed Alliance for Education for Democracy.

Although a statement of intent has been drafted, the alliance has yet to be formally organized.

Once details of the alliance’s formation are worked out in the fall, representatives are expected to include educators and administrators from Chapman College; the University of Tennessee in Knoxville; the University of Indiana in Bloomington; the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; the University of Cluj in Romania; the University of Sofia in Bulgaria; Agricultural University in Nitra, Czechoslovakia; Warsaw University; and Karl Marx University in Budapest.

On March 23, the nine schools announced the formation of the alliance at the United Nations headquarters after a group of East European educators--including Wroblewski--completed a three-week tour of U.S. campuses.

With the collapse of the Iron Curtain, organizers said they hope that the academic organization will encourage East-West cooperation, both in research and in faculty and student exchanges.