| |
Comment on this article
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.”  |
|
