Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956
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Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956
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Overview
The Communist dictum that universities be purged of "bourgeois elements" was accomplished most fully in East Germany, where more and more students came from worker and peasant backgrounds. But the Polish Party kept potentially disloyal professors on the job in the futile hope that they would train a new intelligentsia, and Czech stalinists failed to make worker and peasant students a majority at Czech universities.
Connelly accounts for these differences by exploring the prestalinist heritage of these countries, and particularly their experiences in World War II. The failure of Polish and Czech leaders to transform their universities became particularly evident during the crises of 1968 and 1989, when university students spearheaded reform movements. In East Germany, by contrast, universities remained true to the state to the end, and students were notably absent from the revolution of 1989.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781469623856 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Captive University
The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956By John Connelly
The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2000 The University of North Carolina PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8078-4865-4
Chapter One
Soviet and Central European Systems of Higher EducationThe difference between Soviet and Central European universities was easiest to see in their respective relations to the state. The former were part of the state hierarchy, with no recognized autonomy, whereas the latter, though regulated by law, possessed a large measure of self-rule. Soviet universities had to justify their activities according to the needs of the centralized economy, and by the late 1920s a theory had emerged whereby only intense, narrowly focused training could produce needed specialists. Less "practical" subjects, like the humanities, suffered neglect. Central European universities also met the needs of the state, by graduating administrators, officials, and the professional classes. The professoriate was politically loyal and could be trusted to administer state examinations faithfully. Indeed Central European universities were state institutions, with budgets controlled by ministries of education. The ministry created and restructured universities, and regulated procedures of academic qualification and length and schedule of the academic year. But despite state intervention, in the 1930s the humanities and the social sciences continued to dominate the university curriculum. In this same period over 60 percent of Soviet higher-education capacity was devoted to the technical sciences, and for a time the existence of universities seemed in doubt.
These differing traditions can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when universities throughout Central Europe came under the influence of the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt. They were supposed to be devoted to research and teaching, neither of which was to be placed in direct service of the state or any other cause; only as ends in themselves might they serve other ends. Despite the growth of natural sciences and the central presence of medical and law faculties in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, universities did not consider themselves training institutions but rather places where scholarship could be pursued for its own sake; philosophical faculties continued to predominate. Although the ideals of interest-free scholarship were never realized, they strongly influenced professors' sense of purpose.
Academic freedoms were safeguarded by academic autonomy. The basic unit of university governance was the faculty, whose affairs were run by the professors. Faculties decided who should join the academic community, for they controlled both student admissions and the granting of advanced degrees (the doctorate and habilitation). Professors enjoyed lifetime tenure, determined what and how they would teach, and enforced discipline at the university, both for themselves and for their students. In ways that varied slightly across the region, the faculties elected their deans as well as the university's first representative, the rector. Rector and deans presided over university affairs in regular meetings of the academic senate, which was the university's main representative organ. Despite requirements for ministry approval of appointments, before the 1930s the state in practice rubber-stamped universities' choices.
Such traditions of university self-rule were hardly known in tsarist Russia. Until 1905 Russian professors enjoyed no corporate autonomy and were state servants enrolled on the table of ranks, not permitted to elect their own representatives. Concessions promised by the government in that revolutionary year were not granted. The Russian state continued to interfere in university operations through censorship and policing to a degree unknown in lands ruled from Vienna or Berlin. The relatively limited demands of Russian professors for autonomy-supported by students-met with consistent repression. In 1911 alone tsarist authorities dismissed or refused teaching privileges to over 130 professors of Moscow University, and expelled some six thousand students. They also pressed thousands of students into military service. Such events seemed fantastic by Central European standards.
Because of the dominant ethos of the period when German university models were transferred to Russia, Russian universities' sense of purpose differed from that of Central European universities. German higher-education reform embodied the ideals of the early nineteenth century: education was primarily to serve the cultivation of the individual. The Russian academic community came into being in the "positivistic and even scientistic intellectual atmosphere" of the mid-nineteenth century, and Russian ideas of scholarship (nauka) became dominated by natural sciences in a way that was not known in Central or Western Europe. The Russian university understood itself more as an instrument of "social progress than of individual cultivation." This more utilitarian approach to higher education was reflected in the proliferation of single-subject institutions, which had no parallels in Central Europe.
Utilitarian tendencies in Russian higher education were reinforced by the dire need of Russian society for education. Although universities throughout Central and Eastern Europe were also elitist institutions, the gap between them and the rest of society was not nearly as wide as in Russia, and they never felt the same pressure to contribute to a relief of social disparities. To be sure, education acted to reproduce inequality throughout European higher education. In the 1920s and 1930s the laboring classes were strongly underrepresented, even in relatively enlightened places like Czechoslovakia. In the extreme German case only 425 students (1.3 percent) enrolled in 1925 were of working-class background. Yet those inequalities were not as extreme as in Russia. Early in the twentieth century, when literacy in Germany and the Czech lands approached 100 percent, half of Russia's school-age children attended no school at all. When long-delayed reforms finally came due, education would have a crucial role in creating a more humane society.
Bolshevik Higher-Education Policies and the "Great Break"
Early Bolshevik higher-education policy was a radical response to the disparities in Russian society and intensified the utilitarianism of the previous regime. Initial reforms must have seemed shocking to Central European observers: in the summer of 1918 the Russian Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) abolished any university admissions requirements other than age. All titles and distinctions of rank were abolished, so that in some places recent university graduates achieved the same standing as senior professors. The state no longer stipulated or recognized requirements for teaching personnel. Now Narkompros arrogated to itself the power to appoint professors, which had for a short time been the prerogative of faculties.
Narkompros simply closed down faculties believed to be uncooperative; law faculties were replaced by entirely new structures called "social science faculties," which were staffed by people loyal to the Communist Party, about half of whom did not have academic qualifications. Because of continuing shortages of loyal social scientists, in 1922 the Central Committee decided to close all social science schools except those in Moscow, Petrograd, Saratov, and Rostov. In the early 1920s it deported a group of 100 to 150 "anti-Soviet lawyers, literati and professors." The aim was not only to remove dangerous ideological influences but to intimidate those professors who remained behind.
There were certain practical limitations to these measures. Students without qualifications could not succeed, and therefore the Commissariat supported the creation of "worker faculties" (rabfaky), which gave workers high school equivalency in three to four years' time. In 1919 the rabfaky were made full-fledged departments of higher-education institutions, and their students came to enjoy the same rights as other students. Those desiring admission had to present a note from a factory committee or a Communist cell certifying endorsement of the Soviet regime. In 1920-21 there were 54 rabfaky, and by 1923-24 a total of 130 rabfaky enrolled 46,000 students.
The NEP period marked a temporary retreat from early radicalism: the rabfaky were scaled back, and in 1923 the government reintroduced student admission requirements, including an examination in the Russian language, mathematics, physics, and social sciences. Students of "bourgeois background" again became a majority. Yet the political pressures on universities were not entirely relaxed-for example, students of unwanted social or political background were purged in 1924, and in 1925 the government introduced centralized admissions standards. The NEP period was a time of contradictions, and debates raged on how Soviet Russia should develop.
With the ascendancy of Stalin, those debates were decided in favor of rapid industrial growth, and the First Five-Year Plan increased the capacities of higher education in a way that was unprecedented in history. The number of higher-education institutes grew from 152 in 1929-30 to 701 in 1931-32. Because of the need for engineers, the growth was slanted toward technical education: from 1928 to 1929 the Party increased expenditures for industrial and technical institutes threefold. In 1928-29, 41 percent of students trained for industry; three years later, that figure had increased to 70 percent. The supremacy of technical education was also reflected in the introduction of "production practice," narrow specialization, and "brigade" methods of group learning to universities.
This "Great Break" proved the nadir of university education in the Soviet Union. In 1929 the official student newspaper asked "Are Universities Necessary?" The answer was predictably negative: as "monstrous conglomerates" holding to "medieval" notions of "pure science," universities hindered the progress of modern, specialized knowledge. The logical thing was to break faculties off universities and transfer them to the competent production ministries. This scheme supposedly rationalized planning, because production ministries could coordinate the needs of their sectors with the output of the schools under their charge. Universities thus sacrificed medical faculties, chemistry and physics laboratories, and language training, all of which became independent institutes. In 1930 provincial universities were dissolved, and remaining universities were pared down to a core of pure sciences. Yet even these withered in the utilitarian climate. At Leningrad University's mathematics department it became impossible to specialize in mathematics, for the professional designation "mathematician" seemed to smack of the past.
Students' lives changed drastically. They studied at such new schools as the Moscow Machine Tools Institute, Gorky Institute for Water Transport Engineers, and Odessa Technological Institute of Cereals and Flours, and, not surprisingly, their majors were highly specialized. Because of projected undersupplies of engineers, student vacations were cut back to almost nothing, and times of study reduced. Yet the impatient government did not wait for graduation to make use of students' labor: during the First Five-Year Plan technical higher schools were required to attach themselves to industrial enterprises, and students were made to work at partner factories throughout the school year. At first the ratio between time spent in production practice and academic study was 1:2, but it was gradually increased to 1:1. Because technical higher schools were matched with inappropriate factories, production practice often hindered productivity. Schools might be matched to any kind of enterprise-for example, a sausage factory. There was also an evolution away from traditional forms of teaching: the lecture system, supposedly symbolic of professorial power, was increasingly replaced by seminars and "brigade methods."
The Great Break also witnessed dramatic increases in numbers of students of proletarian background. In July 1928 the Soviet Central Committee decided to embark on large-scale recruiting of workers and Communists, especially for engineering studies. It allotted high stipends in order to attract a university freshman class in which 65 percent of the students would be from the working class. The rabfaky were revived, and by 1932 enrolled over a third of a million students.
The influx of new students was matched by renewed purging of politically undesirable elements. "Spontaneous" purges removed offspring of clergymen and nobles in the student body. Teachers who failed to be "reelected" to their posts by Communist-controlled committees were dismissed. In this way, 219 of 1,062 professors were forced out of their positions in 1929-30, although given the tremendous need it seems likely that many found their way back to teaching at a different institute of higher education. Those professors who survived the purging often had to submit themselves to public self-criticism, orchestrated by Communist students in what Michael David-Fox calls a "proletarian student movement."
Because of its radicalism and amateurishness, the Great Break proved counterproductive. "Brigade methods" of learning, the abolition of lectures, and the persecution of professors all hindered the production of specialists. In the summer of 1931 Stalin formally rehabilitated the "bourgeois intelligentsia," and the recruitment of workers to full-time courses at higher schools was quietly abandoned. Now workers would be encouraged to add to their qualifications at evening schools. By the autumn of 1932, only national minority students retained special preference in university admissions. In 1940, rabfaky were closed. An end was also put to some of the experimental forms of learning: lectures were reintroduced and students were examined individually rather than in groups. Production practice was reduced and professors' salaries differentiated according to academic status and seniority.
This partial restoration of conventional higher education was accompanied by a partial recovery of universities. Those that had been closed were reopened in 1931-32, though they now taught almost nothing but science; humanities and social sciences were studied only in a few specialized institutes in Moscow and Leningrad. Not until 1934 did the Central Committee reestablish the historical faculties at Moscow and Leningrad universities. "Responsible" Soviet spokesmen less frequently expressed "vulgarly utilitarian" attitudes toward higher education, and a Central Committee resolution of 1936 declared that the country needed "cultured cadres with an all-round education ... who have mastered the knowledge of all the riches which mankind has fashioned."
Continues...
Excerpted from Captive University by John Connelly Copyright © 2000 by The University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
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What People are Saying About This
[A] superb comparative study. . . . This book represents a pioneering foray into a terrain which relatively few historians have entered. In a work of impressive empirical detail and unusual interpretive breadth, Connelly not only offers a fascinating description of the surprising diversity of academia in Eastern Europe under Soviet hegemony, but also questions some of the most basic and long-cherished notions about the nature of Stalinism and the dynamics of 'Sovietization' in the region. . . . Marshalling a massive amount of archival material, Captive University presents at one level a finely textured account of academia. . . . But even more important than its impressive empirical contribution is its comparative method, which offers a much-needed interpretive yardstick for understanding developments within and between the three countries.—German History
A first-rate, pioneering, and enduring study. . . . Constitutes a contribution to the history of East Central Europe in the post-1945 decade, the study of scholarly and intellectual life under dictatorship, the comparative history of this area and of Europe in general, and to the continuing revival of the history of political culture in Europe and elsewhere.—Central European History
With his impressive command of archival sources in three language, his focus on institutional change and its implications, and his emphasis upon the persistence of pre-war patterns and priorities, Connnelly tells a story of resistance to Communism that goes far and carries great weight. . . . This book should be required reading for all specialists of Communist Eastern Europe, and should inspire scholars and students of state socialism and comparative history.—Sovietization of East European Universities
Well researched and . . . convincing.—Journal of Modern History
[An] extremely well researched and documented text. . . . A great piece of scholarship.—Slavic Review
A landmark of comparative higher-educational history, an enormous scholarly effort which presents a bold thesis and argues it with the complexity and nuance that is characteristic of a truly remarkable piece of work.—History of Education Quarterly
Comparative historical studies of the transition to Communist rule in East Central Europe are rare, due to the conceptual difficulties of comparative history and the formidable linguistic challenges involved. This is a well-conceived, superbly researched analysis that deserves to attract a wide readership among historians of
In his superb book on higher education in postwar Eastern Europe, Connelly explores the dynamics of East European Stalinism as does no other author. The research is stunning; the writing is clear and engaging; the comparative method works beautifully. The book is a 'must' for every scholar and student in the field.—Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University