CHAPTER FOUR

The Universities, Their Scholars, and the Inter-University Committee

Before World War II American academic interest in other countries, especially outside Western Europe and the Middle East, was limited to a handful of scholars in a few universities. Few scholars, and almost no students, traveled abroad for research or study. The professor who went to Western Europe for casual travel on his sabbatical or who spent a summer in the libraries of London, Rome, or Athens traveled on his own initiative and almost always on his own funds. Scholars were able with relative ease to remain informed concerning new discoveries and techniques in their fields of interest because the enormous expansion of research and publication of the last three decades had not yet occurred. Few universities had formal relationships with institutions abroad, and international conferences were rare. Our government had no program to assist Americans to study abroad or to help foreign scholars and students to come here. Indeed, except for France, which has long considered the export of foreign culture an important element of state policy, no government before the 1930s devoted substantial effort to improving or expanding cultural relations.

After World War II our study of other societies increased enormously. Scholars and students began to travel abroad for research, on their own initiative but aided by their institutions and by private foundations. Thousands of foreign scholars came to the United States. In short, our campuses began to extend throughout almost the entire world, and the spirit of research and instruction changed beyond comprehension. Our universities, sometimes aided by private foundations and often encouraged and supported by the government, began instructional activities abroad, especially in friendly parts of the world. Some of these activities, like those of the Inter-University Committee, began as independent university functions and then became entangled in national cultural relations policy and in international politics because of our government’s relations with other governments, in particular states that communists rule.

Universities should engage in academic exchange programs with countries communists rule when our government has civilized and mutually advantageous relations with those governments, principally, as Whitehead said, because “the proper subject of study of the university ought to be the universe.” At the moment, communists control a part of the universe. Moreover, in order best to understand another part of the world, our scholar-teachers should study in that country and with qualified scholars and other citizens of that country. Thus, one should go to Central Asia if he wishes to know and understand that area, just as we would hope that a Hungarian interested in American literature or architecture or agricultural development would come here for study. Such opportunities not only enable the scholarly specialist to increase his knowledge and understanding, but they also assist him and his university to help other citizens better to understand the world.

The university should also become involved because we live in a shrinking international community in which no nation has a monopoly of knowledge or the best means of finding it. Our scholars have the obligation, as chemists, physicists, historians, or teachers of language, to share with scholars in other countries whatever discoveries and techniques they have mastered, and to learn as well from them. We do indeed live in a small world. This, of course, was clearly understood in other eras, such as the Middle Ages, which saw the universe as a whole and which was not so afflicted as we by nationalism. When the foundations of the modern university were being laid, the traveling scholar was even more common than he is today. A citizen of Christendom and a responsible member of a universal scholarly community, he knew several languages well, was the product of several universities, and was at home throughout the Western world. Moreover, he recognized and acted upon the conviction that all share the same interests and have an obligation to work together. As St. Thomas, the greatest of medieval scholars, put it, “We are all the same distance from eternity.” In short, we should distinguish between the temporary political condition and the eternal human condition. We should be firm toward communist governments in advocating our principles, but gentle and cooperative with genuine scholars in countries that communists rule.

For all governments, exchange programs are essentially political. The Soviet leaders are interested primarily in improving the Soviet economy and in advancing Soviet political ambitions at home and abroad. Our government seeks to advance our national interests and also to maintain ties, reduce tensions, and increase mutual understanding. On the other hand, our universities, scholars, and students are interested primarily in improving and expanding research and instruction. Universities should therefore become active in academic exchange programs to defend themselves from external pressures, particularly from government, and to prevent others from assuming their functions. They should also assume responsibility simply because the immense political importance of exchanges makes intellectual integrity and high quality paramount.

Paradoxically, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk noted, the program that had the greatest impact within the Soviet Union in the 1960s was that for academic exchanges, established and administered by scholars whose goals were academic, not political. Thus, the nature of the program, which emphasizes academic quality and eschews politics, is directly responsible for its political impact. If the universities should abandon their primary goal and seek a political effect, or if they should allow the government or another outside agency to control their functions or to alter their goals, they would not only violate their own principles but also greatly reduce the program’s political importance.

This university engagement produces numerous problems. The most important derives from the conflict raised or the tensions caused by the nature and function of the university. Ideally, the university is to some degree isolated from society, or at least able to maintain a calm spirit and atmosphere in which scholars can carry out serene and unhindered research and make independent judgments. Ideally, outside forces, particularly political forces, do not affect or influence this effort to increase knowledge and understanding. In short, the university should be an independent institution, in a society and of a society, but free. However, a university that participates in academic exchanges with countries which communists rule becomes to some degree a ping-pong ball of domestic political factions and of international politics. At the same time it is attacked from the right on the ground that it is aiding communists, it is attacked from the left, especially the student left and the neo-isolation-ists, for serving “American imperialism.”

The creation of a league to serve as the instrument of all individuals and universities interested in academic exchanges with the Soviet Union was an elemental and important development, but not inevitable. It reflected the national and international perspective, the good sense, and the vision of the men to whom this volume is dedicated and others who promoted the study of Russia and Eastern Europe before and immediately after the Second World War. Others with less imagination and insight might have launched institutional rivalries that would have been destructive. The small group who founded the Committee had the foresight to recognize that union would assist individual scholars and also provide strength for all institutions that would participate.

Their sensible decisions were of course much influenced by the way in which Russian studies had grown. Moreover, most of these scholars had received their graduate training at Columbia or Harvard, and the group was highly concentrated on the East Coast. They had begun to cooperate in the late 1930s, had shared experiences in the Second World War, and in the 1950s had served together as members of advisory groups and selection teams for the Ford Foundation, the Foreign Area Fellowship Program, the ACLS, and the SSRC.

These men also appreciated that an association of private and state institutions could provide some security for those chosen to study in the Soviet Union, and for their universities, both from the Soviet security police and from American politicians convinced that some professors were communists or were sympathetic to the Soviet regime. All those interested in even brief trips to the Soviet Union in and after 1956 understood the Soviet totalitarian system, its emphasis upon police control, and its hostility toward foreigners. They believed that the regime would be particularly suspicious of specialists who knew Russian and who had had government or military experience. Almost all those interested in travel to the Soviet Union when the Committee was founded, young and old, had served in the government during either or both World War II and the Korean War. Most senior scholars had naturally been engaged in work that involved Soviet affairs. Most of the young had served in the military forces, many of them in military intelligence.

The years in which the Committee was established were also those in which dislike and fear of communism and of the Soviet Union were especially powerful because of the Soviet Union’s repressive domestic system, its control over the peoples of Eastern Europe, its apparent sponsorship of the invasion of South Korea, and the threat it offered in many areas of the world to hopes for some sort of stable peace. Some scholars, many of them distinguished emigres, opposed travel to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe because this seemed to imply both acceptance and approval of Soviet authority in Eastern Europe and would weaken the spirit of resistance in Eastern Europe and the Western world as well.

Scholars and administrators recognized also that formation of a league of universities would enable them to deal effectively with the Department of State, which might seek to influence the behavior of institutions engaged in an exchange program with the Soviet Union. They also realized that programs involving Soviet universities would almost inevitably involve relationships with the Soviet government. Moreover, although the founders hoped that the Committee would be temporary and that its activities, when routine, could be assumed by individual institutions, they also appreciated that an organization with experience in dealing with communist regimes might be helpful one day in arranging exchanges with the People’s Republic of China. In fact, they chose a colorless name, the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants, omitting a reference to Slavic, Russian, or East European, in part to forestall sensational newspaper stories that would attract those wildly opposed to any relationships with the Soviet Union and in part to eliminate any obstacles a title might create for the Chinese communists or the Cubans.

Finally, financial costs were important factors. The Committee was established originally to send scholars to the Soviet Union as tourists. The costs were so great (Intourist then charged $30.00 a day in advance for the thirty days allowed, and travel to and within the Soviet Union was also expensive) that few scholars, especially young ones, could consider financing such a venture. The scholars also came from rival universities that were competing for faculty, graduate students, and financial support, and all were therefore eager to avoid competition in obtaining travel funds from private foundations.

After two years, when the program involved exchanges of Soviet and American scholars, the financial aspect became even more central. It is difficult to define the true costs of education, especially of programs involving scholars from countries with different educational systems, because they carry hidden costs, in the time and energy of scholars, administrators, and foreign student offices. Administration of a program with a suspicious rival state is particularly expensive. However, the Committee estimated in 1958 that sending a junior scholar to the Soviet Union for an academic year would cost approximately $10,500, the equivalent then of four graduate student fellowships. Moreover, the estimate quickly proved to be low because the Committee underestimated the costs of maintaining the participants' families. No universities then or now could sustain such a program.

The universities' financial contributions to academic exchanges have been much greater than even the most prudent administrators anticipated in 1958 or appreciate now. Each university waives tuition and fees for any scholar it accepts. Approximately eighty percent of the Soviet scholars have been scientists who require expensive laboratory space and equipment. Consequently, throughout the period from 1958 through 1969 our universities contributed about one-third of the total cost of the programs. This share has probably not changed substantially under IREX.

In addition, the universities serve scholars who come to the United States on programs administered by the ACLS, the National Academy of Sciences, the Ford Foundation, and other organizations. They serve as hosts for all kinds of visiting cultural groups. This substantial contribution is often not appreciated, especially by organizations that assist foreign scholars to come to the United States and then, often with little warning, ask our educational institutions to provide space, facilities, and instruction.

The institutions interested also realized that the foundations would reject a flood of applications from individual universities but might consider favorably an application from a league of institutions that promised important subsidiary benefits from cooperation. In short, the universities therefore felt profound forces pressing them toward creating a league that would enable them to defend their interests and meet new responsibilities.

Alternatives, of course, existed. One was that each major institution establish a program of its own, as the Soviet government originally proposed. Another was administration by the Department of State, perhaps through an expanded and revised Board of Foreign Scholarships. Professional organizations, such as the American Historical Association, might have established their own programs. Academic exchanges might also have been administered by a “friendship society,” an organization of communists or of those sympathetic to the Soviet Union, that would have placed a political stamp on them, wrecking them almost irretrievably. Finally, they might have been coordinated by a weak new organization that then accepted funds and functions from the CIA, as other needy groups did in the 1950s and early 1960s. This would have poisoned academic exchanges for a very long time indeed.

The principles on which the Committee was established were simple. It was, first of all, a national league of universities, not a grouping of specialists in Soviet affairs. The universities agreed to share responsibilities, opportunities, hazards, and costs, and to choose one institution to serve as administrator, representative, and spokesman. Thus, Columbia University volunteered as the administrative agent in 1956. Dean Schuyler Wallace of the School of International Affairs was chairman, and David Munford served as his deputy. The university as a whole then provided outstanding leadership during the formative years. In the fall of 1959, when Wallace and Munford were totally exhausted by their splendid efforts, the participating universities chose Indiana University to administer the program from 1960 until 1965. In January 1964 the universities invited Indiana to serve another term “from three to five years.”

Administration of the Committee’s program was centralized in a small office on a university campus. Day-to-day operations were in the hands of the chairman and the deputy chairman, advised by a committee of local administrators and scholars.¹ They managed the program, sent participating institutions all available information, and administered the selection of our participants and the placement on our campuses of Soviet and East European scholars.

The general administrative principles devised between 1956 and 1960 have remained in force for both the Committee and IREX, with minor changes and improvements as circumstances changed and experience produced new ideas. The principal administrator was deliberately called chairman, not director, and the organization operated entirely on the committee system. All member' institutions participated in reaching policy decisions at the annual meetings, held in a New York or Chicago hotel the first years and then on a different campus each year. Each institution ordinarily sent one senior administrator, usually the dean of the graduate school, and one faculty specialist on the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe; the meetings were therefore expensive for the universities in administrative time and travel costs. At the same time, this approach produced a significant subsidiary benefit: it helped to bring together senior administrators and area specialists, educating both. The administrator increased his understanding of the need for study of foreign areas and of the special difficulties those studies face, and the specialist understood better the complexities of university affairs and the need to put his interests in the perspective of larger university concerns.

At the annual meetings the chairman provided complete and candid information on all issues, particularly difficulties, which the representatives then discussed fully and frankly. The university representatives also elected a policy committee of scholars and administrators; this group chose the selection committees and ordinarily met once or twice a year to review issues as they arose.

Influenced by the qualities and positions of those who had founded Russian and East European studies and by their knowledge of the conflicts that wracked Chinese studies in the 1950s, those who established and helped administer the Committee emphasized its national character and ensured that all interested universities shared in its work. Its meetings and the work of its committees helped to spread knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of university programs throughout the United States. University parochialisms began to collapse, while friendly and knowledgeable relationships grew. Eastern scholars began to appreciate that institutions beyond the Alleghenies have respectable resources, while scholars from other parts of the country came to understand the dedication and time required to create the great Eastern institutions. This spirit of cooperation naturally expanded beyond academic exchange programs. In fact, the Committee was only one of a series of national cooperative endeavors that have helped to bring our universities closer to each other.

From the beginning of the exchange program any university interested in sending scholars to the Soviet Union or accepting Soviet scholars on its campus could participate. The number of university members rose gradually from the original seven in 1956 to twenty-two in 1960, forty in 1964, fifty-six in 1969, and ninety-one in 1975. By 1960 every part of the country was represented. In 1960-61 the Committee received junior scholar applications from only twelve institutions. In 1968-69 it received applications from forty-one institutions and chose participants from twenty-one. Between 1958 and 1967 the Committee placed Soviet and East European scholars in sixty-two American universities, not all of which were formal members of the Committee; the number rose to eighty-seven by 1975. In each of the last five years of the Committee’s operations and throughout IREX’s administration, junior participants every year came from twenty to twenty-six institutions in various parts of the United States, demonstrating that specialists on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are now scattered throughout the country and that interest is now truly national.

The history of academic exchanges is one of impressive achievement by a group of universities and scholars inexperienced in dealing with powerful, centralized states. However, these years of achievement have been marked by one important failure, the inability of the universities and the other organizations to create even a loose federal system to define and advance their interests. This has wasted time and energy and has created unnecessary squabbles. It has enabled the Soviet government to take advantage of the disunity and the disagreements on our side to “justify” denying us research opportunities to which we are entitled. It has also delayed a careful, rational appraisal of American long-term interests in academic exchanges.

At the outset no one in the government, in the universities, or in other organizations interested in academic exchanges considered establishment of an independent public corporation or national organization to direct or coordinate the various programs. The organizations involved all acted independently of each other and often in almost complete ignorance of each other’s interests. The absence of a national organization, or even of a proposal for one until 1964, reflects our stupor in the 1950s concerning relations with the Soviet Union and the fear that Soviet policy would soon switch again. It also demonstrates the disorganization of higher education, the isolation of humanists and social scientists from the natural and physical sciences, and the relative backwardness of those interested in education and in international politics in establishing organizations to serve their needs.

The founders of the Committee from the beginning planned to surrender its functions as soon as they became “sufficiently routine.” However, Wallace and Munford soon realized from the complications which arose in negotiations with the Soviets that an organization something like the Committee would remain necessary for some time. In addition, the ACLS and the National Academy of Sciences exchanges, the direct exchanges authorized in 1959 between two sets of Soviet and American universities, and the Ford Foundation programs for some of the East European countries demonstrated the need for a common strategy, a confederation of some sort, or a new master organization. The requirement became especially serious when Wallace and Munford realized that Committee scholars were being restricted to Soviet universities, generally in Moscow and Leningrad, and denied access to the institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which the Ministry argued were “beyond our competence.” Finally, the Committee’s experiences were strongly supplemented by its knowledge of the British Council’s system and its admiration for the way the Council coordinated all British academic exchanges and indeed all British cultural activities abroad.

The Department of State also encouraged coordination or even consolidation. Its officers naturally appreciated that establishment of one organization for all academic exchanges would simplify the Department’s work, but they also recognized that such an organization would be able to mobilize heavy support from the academic community if the Department and scholars should disagree. Above all, they saw that the Soviet government was taking advantage of American disunity. The Soviet Academy and the Ministry of Higher Education were no doubt jealous of each other and competed for opportunities to send their scholars abroad, a great privilege then as now. However, the Soviet government used its centralized system for establishing broad policies and for coordinating the activities of its institutions to flood the exchange programs with scientists, to reject a substantial number of scholars whom the Committee nominated, and to deny Committee nominees access to the research institutes of the Soviet Academy. The Department therefore urged our various organizations at least to negotiate with the Soviet government as a unit. However, the 1961 conference it called at Yale for this purpose was unsuccessful.

The Ford Foundation also urged that the various organizations combine their efforts, not only to enable us to negotiate more effectively, but also to assure the most rational use of Ford funds; the Foundation was a major contributor to the Committee and to the ACLS, helped support the National Academy, made substantial grants directly to some of the universities, and supported other organizations interested in study abroad, such as the Foreign Area Fellowship Program. That initiative was also unsuccessful.

Between 1959 and 1965 the Committee made five proposals to the other organizations engaged in exchanges. These ranged from a common application form, through coordination of plans and policies, to establishment of a public corporation to direct all the academic exchanges. The last would have provided an administrative center and a protective umbrella for all exchanges of scholars with countries that communists ruled. It would have significantly reduced administrative costs, simplified fund raising, represented all academic interests in discussions with the Department of State and with all Soviet institutions and agencies, and provided a national forum for discussion of issues. It would have helped to neutralize or sanitize government grants by creating a buffer zone between any government organization that provided support and the scholars. It would also have helped to separate political from scholarly issues.

The ACLS and the National Academy rejected these proposals, pointing out that the arrangements in effect, though cumbersome, worked, while the proposed one might not. Moreover, they noted that creating a new organization might confuse the Soviets with whom we dealt and damage all programs. They agreed only to establish interlocking or overlapping advisory committees.

The Committee’s willingness to dissolve may have reflected its newness and its founders' hope that it would be only temporary. The ACLS, on the other hand, was a half-century old. It has no direct relationship with universities but is a federation of organizations of scholars in the humanities. It properly felt that humanists require special attention. It feared that some large organization which scientists might dominate would neglect research in the humanities. Finally, providing direction and support for research on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had been an integral part of its total program for more than two decades, and it naturally was reluctant to surrender such an important segment of its activities.

The National Academy of Sciences seeks to advance research in the sciences by senior scientists. Its members found it difficult to understand the plight of humanists and social scientists, because they had much greater funds for research and because Soviet scientists are so eager to cooperate with them. It did not wish to entrust the goals of a prestigious institution that had approximately a thousand members and its relationship with the Soviet Academy of Sciences to a large organization in which these concerns might be neglected or used to others' advantage. It even rejected a “single unifying agency for negotiations” with Soviet authorities, which would probably have strengthened the position of the humanists in obtaining access to archives and areas denied them. Moreover, it approved the proliferation of administrative organizations because it saw great virtues in any arrangement that increased the number of Americans in contact with Soviet administrators and scientists.

By agreement from the beginning, the responsibility for administering the Committee’s programs was to rotate among universities. The discovery that jealousies were growing among some of the universities as exchanges prospered suggested that transferring administrative responsibility away from a campus would restore harmony. At the same time, Indiana University and those of its faculty engaged in the Committee’s work were tired by the administrative chores, which had earlier exhausted Columbia faculty and administrators. Moreover, these men proposed several promising new programs, especially multinational research projects on problems of common concern that would almost certainly require new staff and fresh energies. Second, the Committee’s long-term grant from the Ford Foundation was due to expire in 1970. Redefining programs and negotiating an extended grant, perhaps even an endowment, from the Foundation clearly would require a great amount of time. Moreover, the Committee would have to coordinate discussions with the Foundation and with the Department of State, particularly because the Foundation’s willingness to commit itself to a large long-term award rested on assurance that the Department would continue its substantial support. In short, by 1967, as by 1960, the very progress of the Committee suggested the need for a careful review, for identifying new leaders, and for outlining new administrative arrangements.

Fortunately, at that time President Burkhardt of the ACLS concluded that obtaining funds for and administering its small program were too demanding for his staff, and that this generally successful operation should be transferred. Finally, the officers of the Ford Foundation, who had always regretted the proliferation of exchange organizations, decided in 1967 to review its efforts in international studies and in international affairs in order to eliminate or reduce these activities and transfer some resources released to other interests.

The universities at their annual meeting in March 1967 therefore established a Committee on the Future, chaired by Ivo Lederer of Stanford University. This group, which through its subcommittees involved more than a hundred scholars, carried out a thorough review of the previous twelve years and, above all, collected ideas concerning new programs and organizational arrangements. It informed the universities, the Foundation, and the ACLS of its views as they took shape. The national advisory committee then unanimously supported its proposals when it met in San Francisco in March 1968, and the member universities acted with the same unanimity at Seattle on April 20.

In brief, the Committee on the Future proposed establishment of IREX under the aegis of the ACLS and the SSRC. In July 1968 IREX accepted responsibility for the exchange programs of the ACLS and the bulk of those of the Ford Foundation and a year later those of the Committee. The creation of IREX as the single American organization for the exchange of humanists and social scientists with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe increases efficiency and strengthens American leverage in negotiating with organizations in other states.

IREX has continued the principles and procedures that the Committee’s founders established, although its relations with the member universities are much less close and its reporting less detailed and candid. However, moving the administrative headquarters from a campus to an office in midtown Manhattan has reduced university control and has made IREX in some ways just another one of the many national educational organizations with headquarters in New York or Washington. Allen Kassof, whose title is executive director (not chairman) of IREX, is no longer a full-time member of a university faculty, and the staff is almost inevitably more remote from the interests of individual scholars and more bureaucratic than the much smaller Committee group. IREX retains university participation and support, but the universities no longer have the authority they once enjoyed. Indeed, the paper that defined the power and procedures of IREX noted that its director would consult as necessary with representatives of participating universities, which reflects an important shift of authority. The annual meetings are now reporting sessions, not discussions of policies, and they are not held independently but in conjunction with the annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. IREX held no meeting in 1974 because the AAASS met in Banff. Some universities no longer send representatives, in part because they are not so directly involved as earlier, in part because their interest has declined, and in part because of the expense. As their importance has withered, that of other organizations, such as the American Historical Association and the Council on Foreign Relations, has risen.

In recent years the national character of IREX has declined somewhat, and Eastern campuses have begun to dominate it and its important committees. Thus, in 1974 sixteen of the twenty-four members of the five selection committees came from the East, defined here as that part of the country under Eastern Standard Time. All the original American members of the Joint Commission on Collaboration in the Social Sciences and Humanities established in 1974 were from the East: two faculty members from Harvard and one from Columbia, the president emeritus of the ACLS in New York, the executive director of IREX in New York, and the executive secretary of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C. In the spring of 1975 four other members were added, three from New York and one from Philadelphia.

Perhaps the Inter-University Committee’s most impressive achievement was the skill and efficiency with which it placed Soviet scholars in our institutions. At the very beginning the universities quickly agreed that each institution would give careful consideration to any nominee whose papers the Committee forwarded and that they retained authority to admit or reject any Soviet scholar who might wish to study on its campus. They agreed that the Committee should place the Soviet scholar at the institution most qualified to assist him and that he should be treated as any other scholar. They recognized that nomination of an American scholar to study in the Soviet Union did not involve his university’s accepting a Soviet scholar, just as a university’s accepting a scholar did not affect the application of one of its own faculty or graduate students. They also waived tuition and fees as well as the physical examinations and English-language competence examinations that many institutions required for foreign students.

Some administrators in 1958 and 1959 were concerned that the presence of communist scholars on their campuses would cause criticism from parents, alumni, and other concerned citizens. This fear proved to have no foundation. Similarly, the belief that these scholars would cause great excitement was also mistaken; the participants from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had surprisingly little impact, perhaps because so many were laboratory scientists and studied on large campuses accustomed to the presence of hundreds of foreign students, perhaps because they were so much older than most American students, even graduate students.

The principles and procedures adopted in 1958 have survived almost unchanged. Until 1963 the Committee forwarded the papers of every scholar that the Ministry of Higher Education nominated to each member institution, as well as to any other institution mentioned in the application. After 1963 Committee and IREX administrators sent the papers only to those universities mentioned and to any other institutions that the staff thought might provide outstanding service to the Soviet scholar. When more than one university indicated that it could provide effective service, the administrators, with the advice of scholars in the field concerned and of the universities involved, chose that university most qualified and interested to assist.

This system served the universities and the foreign scholars remarkably well. Most mistakes were the Ministry’s responsibility because it provided such inadequate data. Moreover, when later information revealed that a more helpful placement could be made, the universities involved were generous and quick in transferring participants. The Ministry and Soviet participants sometimes questioned placements because they thought that research of high quality was concentrated in just a few institutions. In addition, the Ministry in the first decade insisted that no Soviet scholar be placed alone, even though the second Soviet scholar might have been better served at a different university. The issues that arose were therefore minor and on occasion amusing. For example, in 1969 the Ministry protested at great length against the assignment of a specialist in oil drilling to Tulsa University, which proved the most competent institution, rather than to Stanford or Harvard, neither of which had specialists in that field but both of which have deservedly high reputations in the Soviet Union.

Selection of American nominees was a far more sensitive and rigorous process, but the Committee handled it just as effectively and fairly. The principles and procedures it adopted in 1958 were based on those that the Ford Foundation and its Foreign Area Fellowship Program developed in the 1950s and that the Committee tested further on its original travel grant program. First, the decisions were made through a careful national selection system, rather than by allocating a certain number of awards to each major institution and allowing its faculty to designate the fellowships. The Committee therefore announced the opportunities to universities throughout the country. Its policy committee each year appointed a select committee of several men and women from several disciplines in different universities and in various parts of the country to choose the most qualified candidates. No scholar served on the selection committee more than three years.

This system provided a subsidiary benefit because the selectors learned about principal research trends throughout the country from reading applications and interviewing applicants. Thus, the selection process helped make the Committee a kind of intellectual center for Russian and East European studies. Most important, it created a sense of participation in a genuinely cooperative national enterprise.

The 1958 exchanges agreement provided that participants on both sides should be candidates who had not yet completed their doctorate. After the first year, postdoctoral candidates up to thirty-five years of age were included. This limit was raised to forty in 1964, as the Ministry continued to nominate candidates quite mature by our graduate school standards. The universities decided that all those nominated in the first year should be specialists in Russian studies, because their capabilities and interests would enable them to profit most from the experience and because the natural sciences were “not peculiar to the Soviet Union.” However, the Committee requested and received from the Ford Foundation permission “to select persons other than fully qualified specialists on Russia.” Moreover, the Committee in the second year sent three graduate students in sciences as well as four foreign language teachers, so that transforming the program from one for specialists into one for education in general began very early.

Except for two experimental years—1959-60, when the Committee nominated four graduate students working for the M.A. degree rather than the Ph.D., and 1965-66, in which it nominated two first-year graduate students—each candidate in this program was expected to pass his general examinations for the Ph.D. before leaving the United States. In addition, he should have completed research on all materials available in this country before going to the Soviet Union to use sources available only there. All candidates except those in science were expected to have some knowledge of Soviet society and culture. All were required to have sufficient knowledge of Russian so that they could live and work in the Soviet Union with no difficulty. Before 1967 the Committee required those whose language ability was inadequate to attend a special intensive summer language program in the United States. The Ministry of Higher Education then finally accepted its proposal that the host country establish intensive language programs late in the summer for all participants for the forthcoming academic year.

The selection process emphasized professional ability and promise, then maturity and stability. At the minimum, the Committee expected those selected to demonstrate the intellectual quality required for a fellowship in a major university or in an intensive national competition. It sought to identify truly cultivated young men and women of exceptional ability and promise whose careers would significantly expand our knowledge and understanding. In the early years especially, the selection committees employed the most careful and demanding selection process because they feared that the Soviet government might reverse its policies, end the exchange program, and deny us a precious opportunity to increase the number who had lived and worked there. Particularly since 1969, standards for both intellectual quality and maturity have relaxed somewhat as our need for specialists has been satisfied, our understanding of the Soviet Union has increased, and Soviet life to some degree has relaxed.

The procedures were like those of the ordinary fellowship process. Every member of the selection committee read each application, and the committee as a whole then decided which candidates had survived the first step. At least two members of the committee, neither of whom knew the candidate or had taught in his institution, then interviewed each of these candidates, seeking answers to questions that had arisen earlier and to measure the applicant’s ability, promise, and maturity. The full selection committee then reached a decision concerning those whom it would nominate for study in the Soviet Union.

The concern of everyone engaged in the Committee’s work with maturity and stability led the Committee on February 22, 1958, to adopt two additional steps in the selection process. First, it obtained the university’s endorsement of any of its faculty or graduate students under consideration. In fact, it made the award to the sponsoring institution to ensure that it would assume full responsibility for its scholars. Therefore, after preliminary selection of the superior candidates, the Committee forwarded the name of each applicant to the president of his university, asking the institution to accept full responsibility for “the applicant’s political and emotional stability.”

This step was based on practices established by the Foreign Area Fellowship Program, which Wallace also headed and which sent young Americans to other parts of the world. Wallace believed that “we must know whom we are sending in order properly to weigh the risks we are taking.” In the letter sent to the university president, the Committee indicated it wanted “to know from the central administration of each university whether there is anything in the student’s file of a psychiatric or behavioral disciplinary character which would make you hesitate to send him into an environment where stability and emotional maturity are of great importance.” On occasion a university refused to sponsor a faculty member or graduate student. Thus, one president wrote that the “applicant has all the intellectual qualities to rank him among the very best on our campus, but is sufficiently lacking in emotional maturity and common sense to force us to conclude that we cannot sponsor him as our representative overseas.”

In April 1970, in part because of the uproar in the late 1960s against university scrutiny of the qualities and activities of its scholars and students and in part because university approval no longer seemed necessary, IREX dropped the requirement of university sponsorship. However, the proper concern of the Committee’s founders with this issue was demonstrated in an important new program in 1973, when the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China established a small exchange of senior scholars in delegations of twelve for short periods of time. This organization announced that selection would be based on “scholarly merit, reputation in the field, maturity and good judgment, and diplomacy.” Moreover, it did not accept applications; for each delegation, it appointed a chairman and two advisers to recommend a slate, from which the executive committee made the selections. In short, the group responsible for exchanges of senior delegations with China is even more prudent concerning maturity and responsibility than the Inter-University Committee had been.²

The second additional step was the Committee’s decision to send to the Department of State the names of those who had survived the first stage in the selection process, at the same time it forwarded the name of each applicant to his university for sponsorship. This enabled the Department to complete a “name check,” a low-level review it used when considering applications for all of its cultural exchange programs and that federal agencies use for positions which do not involve access to confidential information and are not “sensitive.” The other private organizations that administered academic exchange programs with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and that accepted federal funds, the ACLS and the National Academy of Sciences, later followed the same policy. This procedure survives in 1975, although the Department plans to end it. It came under heavy attack in the late 1960s, when many questioned all structures of authority and national policies, especially our policy in Southeast Asia.

From the beginning, both the universities and the Department of State realized that selecting Americans for study in the Soviet Union would be a delicate task. They agreed that the academic quality and promise of the participants were central, that scholars should make the decisions, and that these scholars should follow the same principles and procedures used when they granted fellowships for study within the United States. They also agreed that the Soviet Union is a special country, as the very existence of a government-negotiated exchange program demonstrated. They therefore concurred that those selected should be men and women of “political maturity and emotional stability,” “steeped in the American tradition,” and “good representatives of American higher education.” They agreed, too, that in the first years at least the Committee would not nominate anyone “born within the present limits of the U.S.S.R.” or who had defected from the Soviet Union.

The Department naturally had a special interest in the quality of those selected in this first exchange program with the Soviet Union, one which it had negotiated, to which it contributed financial support, and for which Congress would hold it responsible. Department officers believed that the successes or failures of the program might have an important influence upon the total Soviet-American relationship. Moreover, the Department in 1947 had established an autonomous Board of Foreign Scholarships composed of eminent and responsible citizens appointed by the president, which had full authority to select American participants for study abroad under the Fulbright program and other educational programs for which government agencies provided funds. The Board reviewed applications similar to those used in all fellowship competitions and followed the same principles and procedures. It also had access to classified information, which was held secret for reasons of national security. It reviewed this material in the same scrupulous way as the rest of the application before reaching its decisions. In particular, the Board at its first meeting in 1947 had adopted the “name check” review.

The Department, the universities, and the great majority of interested scholars accepted and approved this system for applications for Fulbright awards. However, two or three prominent scholars created a fearful row when they charged that the Board had rejected them for political reasons. This situation was exacerbated when the Board then refused to explain its decision, a policy that all fellowship-granting organizations properly follow. In general, however, most scholars and officials thought that this solution to a complicated problem was sensible and successful.

The Committee, however, would not yield its authority to the Board of Foreign Scholarships. It insisted instead that its own selection committee have full authority to choose its participants. In a most important decision the Department of State recognized the special character of this exchange program, agreed that the Committee and the participating universities should select the American participants, and yielded the authority that the 1947 legislation had given the Board of Foreign Scholarships. In turn, the Committee agreed that it would send the Department the names of the applicants who had survived the first step in the selection process.

The Committee announcements indicated that its programs were part of a formal agreement negotiated by the Department of State. Its administrators and selection committees made clear that the selection committees alone chose the nominees, and letters to applicants who had survived the preliminary screening informed them of the “name check.”³

In the first year, 1958-59, no problems arose because the Department encountered no information which suggested that any individual under consideration be denied this opportunity. In the spring of 1959, however, the Department informed Wallace that its information suggested that one candidate should not be allowed to participate. In response, the selection committee and the university involved completed another full review of the data they possessed. They concluded that the candidate did qualify. The Department reiterated its position but informed Wallace that the materials on which its views were based could not be divulged. In turn, the Committee refused to share its information or open its files to the Department, which asked for access only in this initial case.

In this situation, Wallace and Department officials reached an extraordinarily sensible solution. Except for the first individual in 1959, about whose identity the selection committee had already learned, and the controversial case in 1967 discussed later, they arranged that the selection committee not be informed, so that Department reservations did not affect its judgment. They agreed that a member of the academic community, whose judgment both the universities and the Department respected and who had obtained the appropriate security clearance, would read the Department’s material in those instances where the Department had reservations. Both parties would then accept whatever decision he reached. Thus, if he concluded that the applicant should be allowed to participate, he would be nominated, if he survived the selection committee process. If he reached a negative decision, the applicant would not be nominated, whether or not he survived the selection process.

This procedure resolved the issue in 1959; the candidate under consideration was nominated, accepted by the Ministry, and spent a successful year in the Soviet Union. In the following years the Department of State indicated that its evidence suggested that the Committee should not nominate 13 of the 1,777 applicants. In each case, a member of the academic community read the Department’s materials. In nine cases he recommended that the candidate participate; eight survived the selection process, were nominated, and then went to the Soviet Union. In one of these cases, all three of the senior American ambassadors who had served in the Soviet Union, as well as the heads of the Bureau of European Affairs and the then Office of Soviet Affairs in the Department, recommended against this decision; nevertheless, the applicant did go to the Soviet Union.

In four cases the scholar concluded that the applicant should not be nominated. In one instance the Department possessed published information that a court in a democratic European country had convicted the applicant for serving as a spy for the Soviet Union. In a second case, the candidate had served as a courier between the Soviet Communist Party and a revolutionary party in another part of the world. In a third case, which was particularly complicated, the scholar who reviewed the materials consulted with two colleagues who had reviewed Department files on similar occasions. All three then met with the candidate; all four agreed that he should withdraw his application because a visit to the Soviet Union would be most hazardous. The fourth instance, also quite complicated, will be discussed later. In none of the four cases had the applicant completed the selection committee’s screening process and won nomination.

In short, this agreement, in which the Department of State surrendered an important part of its authority to a private organization, worked successfully, guaranteeing the rights of the individual candidate as well as those of the Department, the universities, and the program as a whole. In fact, if the Department of State had retained authority to make the final decision, the universities would have surrendered an essential responsibility and eight candidates ultimately selected would not have been nominated for study in the Soviet Union.

In the winter of 1966-67, when the Department of State raised a question concerning an applicant, the Committee followed the procedures used effectively on twelve other occasions. As the responsible academic in this instance, I read the papers of the candidate, an outstanding young scholar who had participated earlier and had requested another grant. I decided it would be unwise for him to return, largely because a report he had written after the earlier occasion revealed in great detail that Soviet security officers had shown a special interest in him and that American officials in Washington and Moscow and the individual himself then believed that his remaining in the Soviet Union would be hazardous. He had not kept a copy of his long report and had forgotten its substance, so we reviewed it together. He then accepted the decision, and the issue seemed settled.

However, the applicant reversed his position and asked his friends and associates at other universities to protest. Perhaps inevitably, because of the intellectual climate in those years, the campaign shifted from a complaint concerning rejection of an applicant to a general attack on the Committee, its procedures, and its relations with the Department of State. A review committee of three senior scholars quieted the storm when they upheld the rejection and found that “the chairman of the Inter-University Committee had had a reasonable basis for his action in recommending rejection and that, in his place, they would have come to the same judgment.”

As often occurs in controversies of this kind, the incident was engulfed in ironies and paradoxes. Far from collecting and making available confidential information concerning applicants, as its critics alleged, the Committee’s staff had created a special sealed file containing all such information, set aside so that no one should have access. Thus, not even the members of the selection committee saw the report that was the foundation for the decision. In fact, I was not aware that the Committee had a copy, and I read the copy in the Department of State’s file. Moreover, the Committee concealed the unsuccessful candidate’s identity, but he and his friends exposed it. Some of the critics had themselves urged that the selection committees be most restrictive in selecting candidates. The ultimate irony was that one of those who strongly urged that the Committee have no relationships whatsoever with the Department of State later that year asked the Department for some kind of semi-official status while he traveled to the Soviet Union on another fellowship.

After this incident the Committee made two changes in procedure. First, although it had always informed applicants of the Department of State’s role, it also sent a formal letter to each person interviewed stating that “Since Department of State funds are involved, final selections are made with the authority of the Board of Foreign Scholarships, in accordance with the provisions of the Fulbright-Hays act. The names of all applicants and accompanying wives therefore have been forwarded to the Department of State.” In addition, instead of having one specialist in the field of Russian studies review the Department’s materials, the Committee established a committee of three senior scholars, one from the West coast, another in a Midwestern university, and the third a physicist in an Eastern university who had long participated in the Committee’s work. In 1967-68 the physicist read the materials concerning four applicants “flagged” by the Department of State. He then discussed the information, but not the names or circumstances, with his two colleagues. One applicant’s university refused to sponsor his application, so the committee needed to make no decision in his case. The three scholars then decided unanimously that the other three applicants should participate. As in earlier circumstances, no identities were revealed. All three whom these scholars approved did in fact go to the Soviet Union.

In the spring of 1968 the universities approved a further revision establishing a Board of Review of three from outside the academic community and outside government acceptable to the Department of State and the Committee to review the materials concerning any candidates about whom the Department raised a question and to interview the candidate if he wished to appear. The Board retained authority to permit candidates to go to the Soviet Union. However, it did not have authority to reject a candidate; it simply warned any who faced exceptional risks and advised others that they should not participate. In short, the decision in some cases was left to the individual, after he had been fully informed of any peril to him and to the program. The Department of State then retained final authority to deny the applicant permission to go to the Soviet Union. I considered these steps a surrender by the universities of a responsibility they should have retained, one that reflects the emotional madness which affected some members of the academic community in those days.

Since 1969 IREX has continued to submit the names of applicants to the Department of State for review. When the Department raises a question concerning a candidate’s participation, it notifies a referee from the university community acceptable to IREX and to the Department from a discipline other than those from which most participants come. Neither the selection committee nor anyone associated with IREX is informed. The referee, after reviewing the Department of State materials, discusses their content, without revealing the name of the candidate, with two consultants chosen by IREX from the university community who have participated in the exchange program, are familiar with conditions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and have no association with IREX or the selection process. The three vote, with their decision binding on all parties.

Even during the most nervous years the Committee had the good sense and courage to keep the need for political maturity in perspective. Thus, it sent to the Soviet Union one or two young men who had been communists, others who had worked for intelligence agencies or the National Security Agency, and an officer of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), all enjoined, like their colleagues, to concentrate on their research and to engage in no intelligence or political warfare enterprises. In the late 1960s, after exhaustive study, the Committee nominated a young man who had innocently participated in a small exchange program administered by the National Student Association in the early 1960s but secretly financed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). At about the same time, after similar careful scrutiny, it endorsed a young scholar who had traveled to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1962 on a grant from the Program for Intercultural Communication, which neither the applicant nor the Committee knew the CIA had founded.

In general, the selection system worked remarkably well, although the Committee made several horrendous errors in selection and, no doubt, erred also on rejection. The membership of each selection committee varied because of the rotation system, and some committees naturally had more insight and better judgment than others. Usually, the selection committee followed the principle that “when in doubt, do not send the applicant,” but various committees did gamble concerning impressive candidates who had apparent flaws or presented problems of one kind or another. Some gambles were successful, others were not. Comments were constant concerning the selection system, but proposals for raising the standards were balanced by those suggesting that we lower them.

The selection process and the entire exchange program has taught us much about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and about higher education. We have also learned a good deal about the willingness of some scholars and graduate students to violate most central professional canons in order to obtain a coveted goal. The dishonesty of a few applicants and their sponsors would depress anyone who participated or who reviewed the history of the selection process. Thus, some scholars who understood the particular conditions of life in the Soviet Union failed to mention that applicants they were recommending had psychological problems and were under psychiatric care, although they were fully informed. Some candidates concealed debilitating psychiatric stresses, and others concealed physical health problems. Several participants sought to conceal other fellowship awards, and others cheated on the grants that they received for expenses, particularly travel. Three applicants, with the approval of their mentors, proposed research projects other than those in which they were in fact engaged and therefore went to the Soviet Union under false pretenses. The Ministry of Higher Education, to the participants' and the Committee’s chagrin, discovered this trickery and arranged for the participants to leave.

The relationship between any fellowshipgranting organization and its Fellows has certain competing elements imbedded in it. The granting organization has high expectations of performance. When the program is new and offers a rare and especially valued opportunity, expectations are correspondingly lofty. On the other hand, the Fellow, who has demonstrated outstanding qualities in a national competition, comes to believe that his opportunity is a right. This attitude was especially common in the 1960s, when fellowship funds were vast and many graduate students lived in comfort for several consecutive years on substantial grants. The relationship was especially complicated because living and working conditions in the Soviet Union differ considerably from those with which we are familiar.

Throughout the history of the academic exchange, those responsible for its administration have fretted over relations with participants and with alumni. They discussed it annually at meetings of university representatives and at policy committee meetings, and they sought to revise the relationship as Soviet policy changed. Moreover, they also discussed this with administrators of the British Council and of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. They were always relieved to learn that these organizations were concerned about the same issues and adopted similar policies.

During the early years the administrators of the Committee, the selection committees, and the university representatives as well may have overestimated the strains life in the Soviet Union place upon our participants, although most alumni urged raising the standards for maturity and stability. One participant and veteran described the circumstances as “more severe than in the Army.” Some participants and senior scholars believed the tensions so great that they recommended a psychiatrist participate in the selection process. The Committee therefore allowed each participant to visit Finland or Western Europe for a week or two around Christmas, a tradition IREX continues. In addition, it arranged that the chairman, accompanied by one or two other scholars, visit the Soviet Union in January, a custom IREX also follows. These visits, and similar ones British Council representatives make, were designed to overcome the isolation most participants felt by January and to help them obtain access to Soviet archives and study-related travel.

For most participants the Committee and IREX ceased to exist after they reached the Soviet Union. Most gloried in their confident independence and made their way in the Soviet Union with seriousness, tact, and humor. They acted precisely as their mentors and sponsors had hoped they would, and they enjoyed a fruitful experience. For those who were baffled by the Soviet bureaucracy and especially frustrated by its endless skills, the Committee, and later IREX, became distant and powerless agencies responsible for but unconcerned about their desperate front-line plight. These men and women often nurtured resentments, as veterans remember the contrast between their hardships and the comforts of those back home.

The nature of the evidence concerning the activities and experiences of American participants in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is inevitably fragmentary. The Committee and IREX sought and obtained only brief reports from participants. They urged each participant to send a letter within a month after his arrival, providing the chairman and his professor in the United States with his address and telephone number, the name of his Soviet rukovoditel' or director of research, and information concerning his first weeks of work. They also urged him to send a further report in December, identifying problems so that the chairman might be of assistance during the annual January visit. After the participant had completed his semester or year of study he was expected to write a report, with particular emphasis upon suggestions that might help future participants. The reports to the Committee, which I have carefully studied, were often brief and incomplete. In fact, many participants in the various exchange programs filed none.

The great majority proved to be men and women of exemplary professional ability and promise, maturity, and personal integrity. In fact, they reflect great credit on themselves and their institutions. The contributions their publications and their teaching have made to improving the quality of research and instruction concerning the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are already immeasurable and constitute the supreme justification for the exchange program. However, perhaps as many as five percent acted in a fashion that discredited them, often placed them in some jeopardy, and of course gave Soviet critics of American scholarship and of the United States splendid ammunition. Three unfortunate participants, overwhelmed by the pressures of Soviet life, indicated to American friends in the Soviet Union, to relatives at home, or to their mentors that the strains were becoming intolerable. However, after the Committee had encouraged them to leave because of these declarations, they became “bold cowards” and charged it with improperly recalling them. A small number wasted this opportunity, failing to work or even to enjoy the cultural life, as a good number do at home. Unfortunately, these dilettantes aroused Soviet suspicion concerning their activities and those of their fellows. Others behaved in more reprehensible fashion. One clipped articles from Soviet newspapers and magazines of the 1920s. Several engaged in the black market, selling American goods to Soviet speculators. Two were arrested for consorting with drug addicts and speculators, although they were not guilty of selling or using drugs and were not themselves involved in illegal activities.

Perhaps more serious, because these activities endangered Soviet citizens who could not leave the country, some kept diaries, relating in detail political conversations with Soviet students and professors, some of whom they identified. In fact, one participant some days wrote twelve or fifteen pages concerning his conversations. The Soviet police read some of these diaries, and Soviet citizens were thus needlessly exposed to danger. Others were similarly careless and indiscreet in correspondence with Soviet citizens, in telephone conversations that they learned later had been monitored, and even in their publications, which is especially inexcusable. Some scholars whom the ACLS and the National Academy of Sciences sent were just as irresponsible.

In the eleven years the Inter-University Committee administered its several academic exchange programs, it withdrew nine American participants from the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe, in every case but one with the advice and approval of the participant’s supervising professor and his university. IREX has withdrawn at least one in the years it has administered its programs. It has also refined and made more cumbersome the conditions and procedures for withdrawing a participant for breakdown of physical or mental health, academic nonperformance, “evidence of voluntary or involuntary involvements in intelligence activities of any kind whatsoever, whether by the participant or by an accompanying family member,” or gross misconduct.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery these programs have revealed about American academic life has been that the majority of the youngish specialists on Russian affairs have not sought an opportunity to study in the Soviet Union. For example, only twenty percent of those who obtained the Ph.D. degree in any one of the fields of Russian studies from 1960 through 1964 had by 1969 applied for an opportunity to study in the Soviet Union. Only one-eighth of the Foreign Area Fellowship Program Fellows in Russian studies over a longer period, from 1952 through 1965, had sought that opportunity by 1969, even though they had proved in national competition that they were the most promising young men and women in the Russian field. In only six of the Committee’s eleven years did the number of junior candidates selected equal the number the agreement allowed. Indeed, the average number of applicants for the period from 1958 through 1969 was slightly less than 100, only three times the number of nominations possible. Under IREX the number of applicants slumped from 123, the figure for the last year under the Committee, to 104 in 1969-70, 98 in 1970-71, and 86 in 1971-72. In the succeeding three years it rose to 95, 120, and 140, before slipping to 135 for 1975-76. The number of applicants for the exchange of senior scholars that the Committee and IREX have administered between 1962 and 1975 never rose to 60.⁴

This disinterest is especially remarkable when one considers the spectacular growth in the number of Russian specialists throughout the 1960s and the dedicated and imaginative efforts the Committee and IREX made to announce these splendid fellowship opportunities. Whatever the cause, many of the hundreds of specialists on the Soviet Union educated in the 1960s and early 1970s clearly lacked the dedication to their profession and the interest in studying in the Soviet Union that our handful of scholars had demonstrated in the 1920s and 1930s and that a large percentage possessed in the 1950s.

A number of factors are responsible for this. They include the unpleasant, uncomfortable, somewhat tense life in the Soviet Union. Some decided not to apply because they believed they lacked the intellectual or related qualities the exchange program required. Others refused to accept Soviet influence or control over their choice of a research subject. Others were turned away by their knowledge of Soviet inefficiency and by Soviet delays in reaching decisions concerning admission. Some did not apply because of the unwillingness of their spouses to participate. The refusal of the Soviet government until 1972 to admit children forced many to choose between going to the Soviet Union and staying home with their families. Some young scholars, particularly in the sciences, were eager to accept academic or other appointments and to enter directly a productive life of teaching and research, rather than delay by spending a semester or a year in the Soviet Union. In addition, some faculty members discourage their students from applying until they have completed the Ph.D. At that time, the young scholar often has a spouse and children and concerns about his future that persuade him not to apply.

Other significant factors are our national attitude toward learning foreign languages and the continuing acceptance of inferior command of languages throughout our system of higher education. Our graduate programs on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe generally have higher language requirements than do most graduate departments, but most still emphasize reading and tolerate low performance in understanding, speaking, and writing. Few seek to make a period of study in the Soviet Union or a part of Eastern Europe an essential part of the planned curriculum of even their most promising graduate students or to insist that these students prepare to spend a semester in the country in which they are most interested. Most graduate students therefore arrange their study programs and research projects so that they can complete their degrees without study abroad. The quality of our research and instruction is therefore lower than it need be.

No graduate program can require its degree candidates to study abroad or can provide assurance that even its most highly qualified students will be able to study in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. Moreover, no national organization seeks to or could impose language standards. In addition, many inspiring teachers in Russian and East European studies have not mastered the languages necessary for living or doing research there, and raising language requirements for such men and women would not be productive.

Perhaps the best solution to this shortcoming would be reviving the Committee’s original program, enabling young scholars and teachers to travel a month or two in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This would not only increase their knowledge and understanding, but it would motivate some to increase their own abilities. But raising this issue and proposing a return to the 1956 travel program, established to enable enthusiastic scholars to visit the country of their special interest, reveal that Russian studies have lost some of the qualities that its founders possessed and that created the Inter-University Committee. It should also remind us that academic exchanges constitute an unsatisfactory and temporary means and that free and unfettered opportunities for research and study by scholars in all countries still remain our goal.

¹The deputy chairmen were central figures. The Committee was extremely fortunate in the intelligence, skill, and dedication of these men and women: David Munford, 1956-60; Stephen Viederman, 1960-65; Howard Mehlinger, 1965-66; E. Willis Brooks, 1966-68; and Miss Patricia Lambrecht (now Mrs. Richard Gordon), 1968-69. Since 1969 Allen Kassof has been the Executive Director of IREX, with Daniel Matuszewski his deputy for the Soviet Union and John Matthews for Eastern Europe.

²Harrison Brown, “Scholarly Exchanges with the People’s Republic of China,” Science, LXXXIII (January 11, 1974), 52-54.

³Other Western countries escape this thorny program because their governments control and administer the academic exchange programs and bring university scholars into the process. Thus, the British Council invites each British university to nominate several graduate students or scholars for the appropriate program, thereby creating a preliminary selection process within each institution. The Council selection committee contains a number of academics and has full access to all data, including those in the government’s possession. In addition, on the exchange program with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Council works closely with the vice-chancellors and principals on applications on which questions arise.

⁴The number of junior applicants rose gradually from 60 in the first year to 127 in 1964-65. It then declined to 104 the following year, 98 in 1966-67, and 84 in 1967-68.