Once-Communist Countries Make Way for the Liberal Arts

From the hilltop in Jinonice, a neighborhood on the outskirts of this city, the church spires and medieval squares that make the Czech Republic capital such a tourist destination are plainly visible.

Here in Jinonice itself, the physical surroundings are more typical of the former Soviet bloc, the low hills crowned with uniform, concrete housing towers, skirted by highways and concrete plazas. Jinonice's architecture, like many a Soviet-era development, is regimented, utilitarian, and unimaginative.

But one of these towering apartment complexes is home to one of Central and Eastern Europe's pioneering liberal-arts institutions, a small but growing set of colleges that aim to introduce critical thinking and a broad interdisciplinary curriculum to a region still recovering from decades of totalitarian rule.

"There's a very deep tradition that the purpose of the universities is to educate state officials," says Jan Sokol, dean of Charles University's new Faculty of Humanities. "Our goal is to prove that there is a viable alternative."

The American liberal-arts tradition -- where college students are exposed to a broad range of courses in pursuit of a four-year bachelor's degree -- has been gaining ground worldwide over the past decade. Many educators believe the approach is becoming increasingly relevant in the new global economy, which, despite its technological demands, also needs flexible, innovative people who can work in many environments and constantly adapt to a rapidly changing workplace.

"With the end of the cold war, the focus on scientific specialization no longer carries the force it once did," explains Nicholas H. Farnham, president of the New York-based Educational Leadership Program, which supports many liberal-arts efforts overseas. "Everywhere, there is more interest in the humanities and the benefits of broader education."

Branch Campuses

Private universities and branch campuses of colleges in the United States that feature the liberal arts have opened in recent years from Bulgaria to Japan. Students have flocked to these institutions, which typically offer degrees accredited in the United States and far more curricular freedom than is typically available at the countries' public universities.

Now, public-university systems are starting to respond. From Madrid to Moscow, officials are adopting more flexible credit and degree systems modeled after those in the United States. New public institutions have opened in Central Europe, the Middle East, and other regions that are embracing broad liberal-arts education.

"It's absolutely critical for students to have a good foundation in the liberal arts if they are gong to be successful in the 21st-century world," says B. Dell Felder, provost of Zayed University, a new public institution for women in the United Arab Emirates. "It's not the specific things that you know that are the most important, but your ability to apply what you know to the situations you encounter and your ability to keep on learning the rest of your life."

Nowhere are these changes more striking than in the former-Communist nations of Central and Eastern Europe, whose higher-education systems are still recovering from totalitarian rule. Leaders of pioneering public liberal-arts institutions hope to strengthen not just the hiring prospects of its graduates, but democracy and civil society itself.

The Soviet higher-education system -- imposed on its satellite states after World War II -- was the polar opposite of the liberal-arts model. Universities were really factories that turned out centrally planned quotas of narrowly trained specialists to be transferred to the state enterprises and agencies that needed them. Students had little or no opportunity to study other subjects, choose courses, or change disciplines; dialogue and classroom discussions were unheard of. Research and graduate studies were undertaken by a separate network of single-discipline research institutes controlled by each nation's Academy of Sciences, which further narrowed the academic environment.

"The old system essentially consisted of big silos of people," says Dan E. Davidson, president of the American Councils for International Education and professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College. "You had to get into one silo and climb to the top; then you were plucked out and given a badge that said you were a qualified specialist and were sent off into one of the giant dinosaur industries of the Soviet domain."

That approach has contributed little to the all-important task of reforming and rebuilding the shattered economies and societies of the former Soviet republics, Mr. Davidson says. "There are social and economic problems that are only going to be solvable by people who can ask broad questions."

Recognizing the need for change is one thing, but actually achieving it can be quite another. Across the region, university reform has moved slowly, as big institutions resist sweeping changes that would require closing or replacing teachers, departments, even entire institutions.

"Universities are very conservative," says Laszlo V. Frenyo, a former president of the Hungarian Rectors' Conference who is now dean of Western Maryland College's campus in Budapest. "But there's a slow realization that unless they change their systems entirely, they will begin losing students to the branch campuses of U.S. and Australian institutions, which have been coming into Europe very aggressively."

So instead of changing existing institutions, liberal-arts pioneers have started new colleges and institutes, most of them within or associated with some of the region's largest and most prestigious universities. The University of Warsaw, Charles University in Prague, St. Petersburg State University, and Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, are among those that have started liberal-arts colleges.

"We've tried to transform the old universities from the inside," says Jerzy Axer, director of the University of Warsaw's Center for Studies on the Classical Tradition, a liberal-arts institute. "It doesn't mean the whole university has to be transformed into a liberal-arts college, but we try to break down the walls between departments and universities."

Mr. Axer's mission has snowballed, gathering supporters not just in Warsaw but at universities throughout Poland and Central and Eastern Europe. A classicist who says he "ought to be writing books about Homer and Caesar" has found himself campaigning to revitalize the once-great centers of learning in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. In 1999, his center was one of the winners of the Hannah Arendt prize for higher-education reform from Vienna's Institute for Human Sciences, which promotes scholarly research and debate on educational policy. Charles University's humanities faculty shared the annual prize.

Mr. Axer likens liberalizing a post-Soviet university to constructing a new home without a blueprint. "I don't know how to build a house, but I know it needs plenty of doors and windows," he says. "And I sure know how to punch holes in walls."

A 'Niche College'

Mr. Axer's "hole punching" started simply enough. With the end of Communist control of Poland a decade ago, he wanted to do something to help rebuild the humanities, because free inquiry had been smothered by the regime's demand that everything be interpreted through Marxist-Leninist theory. In 1993, with the support of University of Warsaw administrators, Mr. Axer opened the university's new Collegium of Interdepartmental Individual Studies in the Humanities, a "niche college" that he hoped would help build a new generation of professors. The college, which allows students to work across disciplinary and departmental boundaries, now receives 10 applications for each student it can enroll.

The college became popular so quickly that Mr. Axer soon set up a research center to coordinate interdisciplinary humanities programs on a national and regional level. The Center's Artes Liberales Academy allows humanities students from six Polish universities to undertake study and research at one another's institutions. Another program, the East-Central European School for the Humanities, coordinates training seminars for graduate and postdoctoral students from a score of participating institutions in Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, and other countries.

Across the mountains, in Prague, a former dissident put liberal-arts education on the map in Czechoslovakia. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Czechoslovak Communist Party kicked many of the country's best social-science and humanities professors out of the universities. But students flocked to underground classes conducted by talented dissidents like the philosopher Zdenek Pinc.

Lily Cisarovská participated in Mr. Pinc's secret weekly classes while a student of Sanskrit and Hindi at Charles University in the 1970s. "We had to keep moving from apartment to apartment because the police would come and break them up," she remembers. "There were so many police looking for something to do."

But after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Ms. Pinc returned to the university to start a new interdisciplinary institute where students could pursue a broad education. This year, that institute became a full faculty -- a component of the university that is larger than a department -- of Charles University. "The students just love it," says Ms. Cisarovská, who now teaches in the faculty's communications department.

Students are attracted to the faculty because it is one of the only ways they can pursue higher education without first choosing an exact specialization, says Mr. Sokol, the dean. "As a practical matter, 18-year-old children have no idea what they want to do," he says between cigarettes in his office. "To ask them to choose is really rather unethical."

Finding One's Own Path

When she graduated from high school in the Czech Republic, Vendula Wiesnerová didn't intend to pursue higher education at all; she says she found that most Czech faculties wanted applicants who "know exactly what kind of job they want to do [even though they] don't know at that age what they'll be interested in six months from now." Not wishing to spend years of her life studying something she wasn't sure about, Ms. Wiesnerová assumed university education wasn't an option for her. Then she heard about the liberal-arts approach of Charles University's humanities faculty and knew it was for her.

"I think school should offer the opportunity to find out what we are good at, [and] we simply can't know what that is unless we can try it first," says Ms. Wiesnerová, now 24 and a first-year student at the faculty. "Here I have time to find my own path."

Across Central and Eastern Europe, most students must choose a very narrow academic specialization after they depart from high school, and they are expected to study little else for the next five years. Few electives or opportunities to change one's course of study are available. But the humanities faculty, which now enrolls 1,000 students, doesn't ask undergraduate students to specialize. However, most students stay on for two more years to earn a specialized master's degree because they worry that employers will be prejudiced against generalized degrees.

There lies one of the great ironies of the liberal-arts experiment: While education ministries in many parts of the world are replacing traditional, specialized five-year degrees with the more flexible two-tier bachelor's- and master's-degree structure, few students dare leave the university with only the undergraduate degree.

"The biggest enemy of the liberal-arts B.A. is the broad intellectual convention [in Eastern Europe] that four years is just not a complete education," says Mr. Davidson. "This has meant that every university is pressed to start all sorts of M.A. degrees regardless of whether they have the staff or the resources to do so."

In the former Soviet republics, many people see the liberal-arts experiment as a dangerous foreign experiment or one of the many ways in which the United States is trying to remake the world in its own image. Mr. Davidson, who works regularly with former Soviet higher-education institutions, says liberal-arts experiments in that region need substantial political cover to survive.

Take the private European Humanities University, a liberal-minded institution in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, one of Europe's last true police states. Mr. Davidson says the school is able to maintain independence and an unusual degree of academic freedom because of its Faculty of Theology. The Belarusian Orthodox Church treasures the new faculty and is one of the few institutions with the political clout to rebuff the country's autocratic president, Aleksandr Lukashenko.

For Smolny College, in the less-oppressive environment of Russia, that political protection comes from the leadership of St. Petersburg State University, a hugely influential institution in the city that Czar Peter the Great built to be a window on the West. The university has enacted many experimental reforms, including the introduction of a bachelor's- and master's degree-system and the development of new schools of management and international relations. It started enrolling degree students at Smolny two years ago and expects to have 300 students by 2003. Bard College, the Open Society Institute, and the U.S. State Department provide support or know-how to the college.

Advocates of liberal-arts education underscore that such experiments are intended to provide additional options to students. "Some people think that liberal arts is a threat to the existing institutions," says Mr. Bowlin from the Open Society Institute. "But you can have both. Not every school needs to be liberal arts, but it's what makes the system as a whole work."