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Culture
from Scratch
Since
the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, scholars there have
been struggling to rebuild the national identities suppressed under
Soviet domination. A meeting on Hillhouse Avenue may have accelerated
the process.
November
1996
by Annie Murphy Paul
For much
of this century, the universities of Central and Eastern Europe
were as far from Yale intellectually as they were geographically.
The years after World War II were a time of intense scholarly activity
in the humanities at Yale, spawning two major schools of critical
thought: the New Critics of the 1950s and the deconstructionists
of the 1980s. In this same period Yale also emerged as a leader
in interdisciplinary studies, linking humanities with law and with
the sciences. Meanwhile, scholars of the humanities in Eastern European
universities languished under Soviet Communism, stifled at home
and kept ignorant of developments abroad. Reading lists and syllabi
were dictated by Moscow; regional history and literature were replaced
by Party propaganda; professors who dissented from the official
line were fired or imprisoned.
The fall of Communism
in 1989 brought new freedoms to these countries and their academies,
but also a bewildering array of choices that many of them were ill-equipped
to make. Hindered by bureaucracy, short on funds and resources,
having no precedents to guide them, the universities in Eastern
Europe were often overwhelmed by the task of reconstructing their
national cultures, virtually from scratch.
It seems fitting, then,
that when the humanistic disciplines in Eastern Europe finally began
to emerge from their forced isolation, Yale would be a major source
of intellectual support. That was made plain in August, when 25
leading Eastern European scholars and other educational authorities
gathered at the University's Luce Center on Hillhouse Avenue for
a seminar titled "Curricular Changes in the Humanities: 1945
to the Present." The two-week conference was co-sponsored by
Yale and the University of Tubingen, one of Western Germany's
oldest and most prominent centers of higher learning.Tubingen
has held a series of annual seminars on Eastern Europe for more
than a decade, but this was the first on which it collaborated with
an American university, and the first to be held in the United States.
And unlike previous Tubingen seminars, which centered on economic
and policy matters, this conference was one of the first anywhere
to focus on the humanities in post-Soviet society. "The major
problem in the countries of Eastern Europe is not economics, not
security—the most pressing issue is the need to find a national
identity," says Michael Holquist, a Yale professor of comparative
literature who was one of the organizers of the seminar. "And
the means through which that will be accomplished are the traditional
means: national language, national literature, national history
and culture. This is not an aesthetic extra. This is the stuff of
the most urgent politics right now."
Holquist and his co-organizer,
chair of Yale's Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Cyrus Hamlin, carefully selected the seminar participants for maximum
impact. "We brought to Yale ministers of education, presidents
of universities, heads of institutes—people who have real responsibility
for redefining the curriculum," says Hamlin. Those in the universities,
he says, are capable of influencing education at all levels. In
fact, every one of the participants was involved in some way with
higher education. One of them, Dumitru Ciocoi-Pop, says that universities
must lead the way in the post-Soviet era. "People have lost
trust in institutions that are changing radically, that are trying
to redefine themselves very quickly," says Ciocoi-Pop, who
is rector of the Lucian Blaga University in Romania. "One of
the last bastions of stability in Eastern Europe is the university,
and so it is in a unique position to effect change and influence
the course of events."
The task
that lies before these institutions is daunting.
Ciocoi-Pop says that the university's most important role is as
a "center of social renewal," a place to begin afresh
after what he calls, in the case of Romania, a "long night's
journey into day." The sudden demise of the Soviet Union, he
says, left many who had become used to its rigid structure adrift,
and others angry at their elders and at themselves. "There's
a kind of guilt or self-reproach that comes from being cut off from
the past," says Holquist. "They ask themselves: How is
it that we allowed this to happen to us?" Soviet domination
was a kind of national trauma, in Holquist's formulation, and it
is education that he hopes will help heal the wound.
It will do so, he suggests,
partly by reclaiming the history and culture that was altered or
effaced by the Soviets. Eastern Europeans often received one version
of history at home, and another at school. "For a long time,
people were forced to mouth their country's official history,"
says Holquist. "Now we are waiting to see which of the various
unofficial histories will emerge as the master narrative."
Eastern European academics have begun the arduous job of sifting
fact from propaganda,
legitimate history from
the Party line, often without adequate resources or documentation.
They face, in addition, the complicated task of differentiating
the former Soviet states, not only from Russia, but from each other.
The rich, distinctive cultures of Eastern Europe's various countries
were frequently subsumed under a regime that recognized only class.
But the scholars are well aware that the sorting out of these individual
cultures risks splitting them into hostile factions, as happened
in the former Yugoslavia with such devastating results.
Perhaps the most immediate
obligation of the university in Eastern Europe, says Ciocoi-Pop,
is to educate its citizens, kept ignorant behind the Iron Curtain,
of the past and present condition of the world outside. "It
needs to give people an awareness of what's going on, a truthful
picture not tainted by biases or dogma," he says. The Yale
seminar did its part to educate the professors on what they've missed.
The first week of the conference was organized as a whirlwind tour
of the humanities over the past 50 years, documented largely through
curricular developments at Yale. Participants were provided with
a thick packet of suggested readings, including essays by New Critics
Cleanth Brooks and Rene Wellek; excerpts from the works of
literary theorists such as Paul DeMan and Jacques Derrida; and more
topical articles on subjects that included the relationship between
the humanities and science, and the role of the humanities in the
public sector. Those interdisciplinary issues absorbed much of the
second week, which also included readings and discussions on the
humanities and cultural studies, and humanities and "the other
arts."
Each morning, the visitors
gathered around a long seminar table in Luce Hall for a brief talk
by Hamlin and Holquist, followed by questions and discussion (all
in English). A break for lunch and time for library research ensued,
and in the afternoons, some of Yale's most prominent professors
—Richard Brodhead, Paul Kennedy,
and Gaddis Smith among
them—arrived to deliver guest lectures. Professor of American
Studies Jean-Christophe Agnew was one of those who addressed the
gathering, and he spoke on a topic of particular interest to the
visitors: area studies, or programs devoted to the examination of
a national culture. The Eastern Europeans seemed especially taken
with the idea that a single program, like American Studies, could
encompass the culture of a whole region: its music, art, literature,
theater, and dance. In Europe, they explained, the arts are often
practiced only in conservatories and special schools, separate from
the university curriculum. The visitors' very definition of the
humanities, in fact, was narrow compared to that in the U.S. It
did not emphasize literature or philosophy, but rather focused almost
exclusively on political science and history. "There we can
see the influence of Marxism, in which history explains everything,"
says Hamlin.
Another field of study
that intrigued the Eastern Europeans was Yale's multicultural
offerings: courses on literature and history from all parts of the
world. Although their universities are just beginning to offer classes
about other lands and peoples, they saw obvious applications for
Yale-style multiculturalism.
"Universities
need to help people understand the cultures of others, so that prejudices
against ethnic minorities will be defused,"
says Jacek Holowka, a professor and administrator at the University
of Warsaw in Poland. "Once people understand that there is
the same element in all cultures of ordinary human striving, they
become much more liberal and tolerant."
Beata Klimkiewicz, a
Krakow-based reporter who specializes in "ethnic journalism,"
says that the revolution opened many people's eyes to the diversity
already present in Eastern Europe. "Before 1989, we perceived
culture as homogenous, the same everywhere in Poland," she
says. "We didn't know about the poets writing in minority languages,
about the painters from other cultures who live on our borders."
Klimkiewicz, who is
also a graduate student at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow,
notes that her institution is only beginning to address such peripheral
communities. "What we need is a well-established theory of
multiculturalism, like the one you have in the U.S.," she says.
Before Eastern European
academics can contemplate such innovative changes to the curriculum,
however, they must cope with far more immediate problems. Money
was never plentiful under the Soviet Union, but the unpredictable
flux of the economy after the revolution, and the number of students
clamoring to be educated for newly privatized jobs, have now combined
to put an enormous strain on the universities' already limited resources.
At the University of Warsaw, classes are so crowded that students
have to sit on the floor, and lectures are held in unoccupied movie
theaters because there are too few classrooms.
After the revolution,
there was inflation and a shrinking state budget, and we also had
to let in a lot more students," says Jacek Holowka. "Now
we have less than half the funds per student we had before the revolution.
That is our single greatest challenge." The lopsided student-teacher
ratio is especially acute in the fields that were once off-limits
to students under the Soviet s. "Russian used to be a mandatory
subject in Hungary," says Istvan Kenesei, a professor of linguistics
at the Jozsef Attila University. "Now that people can study
what they want, everyone wants to learn English and German, and
those departments are severely oversubscribed."
The sparse faculties
of Eastern European universities mean that professors must carry
teaching loads that would be inconceivable in this country. At the
University of Leipzig in the former East Germany, for instance,
the American Studies department has only four faculty members to
teach 800 students who have subscribed to the program. Together
with three part-time lecturers, they teach 18 classes a semester.
And the salaries that universities can afford to pay for such work
are often paltry. "Fifty years ago, professors made three times
the average salary in Poland," says Holowka. "Twenty-five
years ago, it was one-and-a-half times. Now a university professor
actually makes less than the average." Some of the universities'
brightest stars are leaving to make more money in Poland's emerging
private sector, he says, and most of those who stay have to moonlight
at one or more jobs to cover their expenses.
The severely
limited library and computer facilities pose another educational
hurdle, for professors and students alike.
At the University of Leipzig, there were no English-language books
purchased for the library between World War II and the fall of Communism.
Anne Koenen, an American Studies professor there, and her students
must travel two hours to Berlin to do their research. "When
I come to the United States, I buy books and books and books,"
says Koenen. She estimates that she has brought back more than 4,000
books over the past three years for her own library, which she lends
out to students. "The university library is now buying English
books, but a lot of the ones we need are no longer in print. I used
to offer to buy books for the library on my travels, because it
was much cheaper to do it that way, but the bureaucracy there is
very inflexible and wouldn't allow it. That's beginning to change
now, but slowly." The situation is worse in Romania, where
Dumitru Ciocoi-Pop says he must often wait five or six years to
acquire books published in other countries.
Although all the countries
represented at the Yale seminar shared the problem of strained finances
and limited resources, they varied widely in the extent to which
they had been controlled by Communism. "Warsaw University never
had to teach the Moscow version of history," says Jacek Holowka.
"Ideological control was limited—we were obliged to give our
syllabi to the ministry of education, but we sent them out without
any response. We taught what we wanted to teach."
Professors were not
so free at the Jozsef Attila University in Hungary. "Before
1989, we had to teach philosophy courses that were full of Marxist
ideology," says Istvan Kenesei. Still, he says, teachers and
pupils found a way around the enforced proselytizing. "Students
learned by word of mouth: 'Go to his class, he teaches unorthodox
thinking.' As a professor, you paid lip service, and then you were
free. It was like speaking in codes. If you weren't careful, you
could be fired."
Being fired was not
the worst punishment meted out to dissidents, of course. Dumitru
Ciocoi-Pop was imprisoned for two years for speaking out against
the Ceausescu regime in Romania. In a free country, says Kenesei,
historians don't necessarily have to be brave. But under the Soviets,
someone who tried to write the truth had to be courageous. He continues,
"Back then, you could feel the corruption everywhere. You would
never believe that it could end."
Even when it did end,
the hostilities engendered by decades of Soviet rule lingered on.
Tensions remain so high that the Russian contingent to the Tubingen
seminar directorate had insisted that the Ukraine, a region that
they still regard as rightfully part of Russia, not be included.
At the Yale seminar, however, Holquist and Hamlin sought out and
invited two Ukrainians. Although nationalist tensions occasionally
flared at the conference, the organizers say that the seminar's
American setting helped to ease most antagonisms. "People from
these countries have very complex relations at home," says
Hamlin. "Here, they could react just as human beings, free
from all those other factors." Indeed, making contacts and
forming a network was one of the principal purposes of the conference.
Because of geographic, cultural, and linguistic barriers, Hamlin
explains, the group would not be able to communicate so easily in
their own countries. Brought across the ocean to Yale, they were
able to exchange ideas in what Holquist calls their new lingua franca:
English. The seminar's grounding in Yale's history of humanities
also offered the Europeans a common starting point. "Their
study of Yale gave them a relatively neutral paradigm to discuss,
rather than the sticky differences between their own situations,"
says Holquist.
The setting
at Yale proved advantageous for other reasons as well.
The participants were able to make use of the University's extensive
library system and meet with Yale professors. More important, they
could observe first-hand an educational system that many of them
regard as a model. "More than anything specific, what I want
to take away from here is the spirit of American education—its openness,
its flexibility," says Ciocoi-Pop.
An example of that spirit
was provided within the seminar itself, by the method of instruction
practiced by the two professors. "The dialectical relation
that Hamlin and I had was almost unthinkable in their countries,"
says Holquist. "It made them want to try team teaching themselves."
Anne Koenen said that she found it "inspiring" that Hamlin
and Holquist were able to disagree so openly about the value and
impact of such curricular developments as deconstruction.
Much as some of the
Eastern European participants may admire the American university
system, however, some also view it as a model of what not to do.
"We look at America, and we're taking a look into the future,"
says Istvan Kenesei. "From this vantage point, we may be able
to correct the course that otherwise we would have entered blindly.
I am rather reluctant to follow in America's footsteps through the
deconstructionist and cultural studies movements, for example. They
have been too radical and too obscure, and may have been plain wrong."
The "political correctness" of current academic discourse,
says Kenesei, "reminds me of the Communist days, when you could
be fired for saying the wrong thing."
But the visitors were
still capable of being impressed—even awed—by what they encountered.
For example, on the Friday of their first week in the United States,
Holquist and Hamlin took them to the Music Shed in Norfolk, Connecticut,
the Yale School of Music's summer home, for a concert of Baroque
chamber music.
"We always accuse
America of being parochial, of keeping to itself," says Ciocoi-Pop,
"but I have been astonished by how cosmopolitan it is."
The participants also
enjoyed a Saturday excursion to New York City: One visitor bought
herself a new wardrobe at Bloomingdale's; another took a ride on
the Staten Island ferry, so that he could get a good look at the
Statue of Liberty. The seminar participants concluded their visit
with a banquet at that most Yale of institutions, Mory's. Toward
the end of the evening, one of the visiting Europeans stood up,
Mory's cup in hand, and offered a traditional Ukrainian toast in
his booming baritone.
If the
visitors seemed to thoroughly enjoy their trip to the campus, Yale
benefitted from it as well.
The conference, says Holquist, was a decisive step toward Yale's
oft-stated goal of becoming a more international university. "The
seminar strengthened our ties with Eastern Europe and with the University
of Tubingen, with which we will sponsor two more conferences,"
he says. Those seminars, for which funding was recently provided
by Whitney Macmillan '57, will address agribusiness and investment
in emerging East European markets.
The renewed focus on
practical matters is useful, says Holquist, "because these
are real, urgent problems. But in the long run, I think that the
humanities in university education will be more important for the
future of these countries. In a way, totalitarian regimes are right
to target history departments and literature departments for takeover.
For good or evil, it is in the humanities that the values are shaped
that will determine what these people and these countries will become."  |
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