Iron Curtain Raising on Campus

By Ezra Bowen

Old hands in Sovietology have never seen anything like it. This semester at Columbia University's Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, 340 applicants put in for 39 spots, twice as many as in 1984. In California the Rand/UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior was bombarded by ten applicants for each of its five openings. At Vermont's Middlebury College, almost 10% of the 1,900 undergraduates now major in Soviet studies, a program only in its third year. Says Berkeley Political Scientist Gail Lapidus: "Suddenly, it's an exciting time to be in Soviet studies."

Indeed, Soviet-American relations have become a hot subject on U.S. campuses. Charitable organizations, including the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, along with Congress, have contributed more than $20 million in the past four years to help underwrite university programs. Classroom study of current events from Soviet TV, beamed in via satellite, has become popular since Columbia started the practice in 1984. One reason for the scholarly surge: the warming climate of glasnost created by Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. But interest in Soviet studies has gained momentum steadily since the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the renewed tensions between the superpowers over nuclear arms early in the Reagan presidency. Observes Russian History Professor James West of Trinity College in Connecticut: "We're one of the fields that benefit from disaster. Russian studies were almost lost with detente."

Moscow has been quick to respond to the renewed interest. Soviet archives that have been nailed shut for decades are suddenly springing open. Jonathan Sanders, assistant director of the Harriman Institute, was recently supplied with hundreds of previously unpublished photos for a book in progress. A Berkeley graduate student, Stephen Kotkin, was permitted not only to visit the remote steelmaking city of Magnitogorsk last summer but also to write three separate columns on his observations for a local Soviet newspaper. In the most striking development of the new academic glasnost, Olin Robison, president of Middlebury, announced in September that a consortium of 18 Northeastern colleges has signed up for a program of undergraduate exchanges planned to begin next year with schools and universities throughout the Soviet Union. Never before has the U.S.S.R. let loose platoons of Soviet students in the U.S. or allowed unchaperoned Americans to study en masse in the Soviet Union. "It's a tremendous breakthrough," says Patricia Olmsted, associate dean at consortium member Smith College.

Next semester 350 students at Tufts College in Medford, Mass., along with counterparts at Moscow M.V. Lomonosov State University, will start an unprecedented joint course in the history of the nuclear arms race between the two nations. The program will include four satellite-relayed televised sessions, during which Soviet and American students will carry on live, transcontinental discussions of critical events such as the Cuban missile crisis. Says Tufts President Jean Mayer, who initiated the idea in a letter to Gorbachev last February: "The time was right."

With reporting by John E. Gallagher/New York