Colleges in U.S., Eastern Europe to Form Alliance

NEW YORK —  Five Eastern European universities and four U.S. colleges, including Orange County’s Chapman College, 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 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, the University of Indiana in Bloomington and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

James L. Doti, director of business forecasting and an economics professor at Chapman in Orange, 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.

The consortium grew out of talks between the Eastern Europeans and Chapman College President Allan Koenig and David Hake, director of business and economic research at the University of Tennessee. It reportedly will involve exchange of information, faculty links, student exchange programs, scholarships and fellowships, Chapman officials said.

While at Chapman this week, the delegation met with students, trustees and community leaders and visited the college’s Center for Economic Research. The Eastern European educators considered the center, which provides key economic forecasts about Orange County to local businesses and municipalities, a possible model for similar efforts in their nations.

“They have a great deal of economic data but don’t really know how to use it or have the technology and resources to do so,” Doti said. “Now that their economic perspective is changing away from . . . the study of Marxist economics and ideology, they’re looking at ways to expand their knowledge of free market economic analysis.

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.