Midwesternizing Turkey

When Kemal Ataturk, first President of the Turkish Republic, was trying to yank the ancient Ottoman Empire into the 20th century, one of his dreams was the development of remote Erzurum province, a bleak, 8,000-sq.-mi region in northeastern Turkey. Erzurum is now awakening, and the agent is, appropriately, a university named for Ataturk. The school has inherited its godfather's impatience with the outdated, but gets its drive from a group of American farm experts,*who are Mid-westernizing Erzurum as steadily as the great Mustafa Kemal once Westernized Istanbul.

Wolves on Campus. Ataturk U. is patterned after U.S. land-grant colleges, founded 100 years ago this month, which put higher education within the reach of every American. Envisioning the same for the Turks, theTurkish government in 1955 bought land for a campus in the mountain-ringed town of Erzurum, at the headwaters of the Euphrates River, 120 miles from the Russian border. The U.S. Government, anxious to help a staunch ally, contracted with the University of Nebraska to establish a university. When Project Leader Marvel Baker arrived, he found that "Ataturk University was 10,000 acres of snow-covered fields, with out even a shed." The snow--often dotted with wolf tracks--keeps Erzurum almost completely isolated for six months a year; in winter temperatures sometimes plunge to 31DEG below zero. The area's humble peasants, living in isolation for centuries, work their fields with plows that have not changed in 2,000 years.

Baker mustered Midwestern agriculture professors willing to brave such conditions. He got a bonanza: five elderly (average age: 62) but energetic profs whose capacity for hard work awes Erzurum's oldsters. Along with their equally vigorous wives, who nurse, teach, bake bread and organize dances, the Americans moved into the dilapidated guest house of a local sugar factory, set up classes in the cramped rooms of a former girls' school. Gradually, the hard-working Midwesterners built their university: a four-year curriculum offering agriculture or science and letters, a 70,000-volume library, a modern dairy, and a research program in crop science, animal husbandry and soil conservation. Thirty-five Turkish students were sent to the U.S. for advanced study, half of them later returning to Ataturk as assistants.

The U.S. specialists cautiously introduced improvements to the suspicious peasants by example. Local farmers were amazed when a yearling calf from the Ataturk research station was brought to market weighing three times as much as their own three-year-old cattle--and they started asking questions.

Twelve-Year Apprenticeship. As Ataturk graduated its first class of 99 students this month, it was still far from being a replica of the University of Nebraska. Partly because of red tape and political turmoil, the complete campus that was supposed to be finished by the Turkish government last year will probably not be ready before 1965. The Americans are also concerned about who will replace them when the U.S. program ends in 1967. Few Turkish professors want to transfer from the Turkish universities at Istanbul, Ankara or Izmir to teach in the frigid boondocks, and archaic teaching laws prevent U.S.-trained assistants from lecturing until they have gone through a twelve-year apprenticeship.

But Ataturk's goals are impressive even by the standards its name implies. With present enrollment at 460, the university hopes to accommodate 1,000 students by 1965, and eventually grow to 10,000. Says R. A. Souchek. the Nebraska-educated Turk who serves as group secretary: "Ataturk University will be a beacon to these people who have lived too long in the dark ages."

*Something of a tradition: site of the first American campus outside the U.S. is Istanbul's Robert College (1863). Americans also helped found Ankara's Middle East Technical University in 1956.

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