Old Rules & New Traditions: Generational Divides in Central and Eastern Europe, 13th International Postgraduate Conference on Central and Eastern Europe, 19-21 February 2014, London (original) (raw)
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For most countries it is safe to say that higher education (HE) is the segment of the education system which has changed the most over the past 50 years. Expansion, massification, greater female participation, privatization, the diversification of programmes, and more recently internationalization and globalization processes have radically transformed national HE systems. In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), these processes of change have not only been much more abrupt and fastpaced than in the West, but have also run parallel to all-embracing political, economic and social transformations and, in many cases, nation-building. HE policy-makers in the region have been forced to tackle essentially all contemporary challenges confronting western HE systems within a much tighter timeframe and under much greater political and economic strain. HE reform has run parallel to the democratization of political institutions, the introduction of capitalism and, more recently, European integration. To complicate matters, CEE universities simultaneously struggled with the restoration of university self-governance and autonomy, academic freedoms, and the renewal of the academic profession. In numerous cases, HE was also at the apex of complicated national language and identity issues. Due its turbulent history and present, CEE higher education displays a striking diversity, which reflect nations' diverging pre-communist and communist pathways as well as different contemporary sources of legitimacy. CEE is home to some of the most tradition-rich universities in Europe, including the Charles University of Prague (1348), Jagellionian University of Kraków (1364), University of Pécs (1367), and University of Vilnius (1578). Many others emerged during the era of nationalism and modernization in the eastern Slavic regions (e.g. the
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After World War II, bilateral agreements within the Eastern bloc brought youth from the newly established satellite states of Eastern Europe to study in higher education establishments in the USSR. Designed to impart Soviet knowledge and practices in the countries of people's democracy as well as to create a sense of solidarity within the bloc, the training of East Europeans in the center of world communism proved a tension-filled affair. Spurred by the xenophobia and chauvinism of the Soviet home front during the early Cold War, Soviet administrators, faculty members and students related to the foreign students, despite their socialist credentials, as outsiders and sometimes as carriers of unwanted influences. For this reason, the educational agreements deepened the sense that fundamental differences existed between the Soviet Union and its client states in Europe.
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For most countries it is safe to say that higher education (HE) is the segment of the education system which has changed the most over the past 50 years. Expansion, massification, greater female participation, privatization, the diversification of programmes, and more recently internationalization and globalization processes have radically transformed national HE systems. In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), these processes of change have not only been much more abrupt and fastpaced than in the West, but have also run parallel to all-embracing political, economic and social transformations and, in many cases, nation-building. HE policy-makers in the region have been forced to tackle essentially all contemporary challenges confronting western HE systems within a much tighter timeframe and under much greater political and economic strain. HE reform has run parallel to the democratization of political institutions, the introduction of capitalism and, more recently, European integration. To complicate matters, CEE universities simultaneously struggled with the restoration of university self-governance and autonomy, academic freedoms, and the renewal of the academic profession. In numerous cases, HE was also at the apex of complicated national language and identity issues.
(2001) “Eastern European Studies: Culture”
The Cold War moved an American knowledge culture to build area studies, but its East European focus could build on Enlightenment notions of a contradictory place neither Orient nor Western. This combination of Western proximity and ‘backwardness’ has shaped much of Eastern European Studies, but the diversity of the region, notably in terms of language, religion, and imperial heritage, has worked against the cultivation of area studies from within Eastern Europe. Instead, the nation shapes other cultural studies and serves an object of study itself. The nation's significance has been elevated by the region's distinctive experience with communist rule, which in turn has organized most of its cultural social science. Studies of cultural productions, the intelligentsia, inequality, political change, war, and civil society have been shaped by questions about the conditions, and consequences, of association with communist rule. With communism's end, culture's place in scholarship about the region has changed. Open borders to scientific collaboration enables, social scientists without cultural expertise to work with indigenous scholars, bracketing culture as extraneous to the scholarly enterprise. There is also more opportunity for ethnography and other culturally sensitive methodologies, and for their engagement with scholarship and policies that operate without recognizing the challenge of cultural difference in studying Eastern Europe.
The development of higher education in Eastern and Central Europe in the aftermath of recent changes
1991
Marxist-Leninist ideology's argument of historical determinism and its claim to conceptual superiority were put forward as the main rationales for the political legitimacy of the communist socioeconomic system in the countries commonly referred to as Eastern Europe. ~ This pretended superiority was also behind profound changes in higher education and the organization of science, which were introduced in somewhat se-Jan Sadlak (Poland/Canada). President of the international consulting firm EastEuroConsult in Toronto and a visiting scholar with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Former Executive Secretary of the Standing Conference of Redors, Presidents and Vice-Chancellors of the European Universities (CRE) and staff member of UNE,~CO-European Centre for Higher Education (CEPES) in Bucharest. First editor of the CEPES journal Higher Education in Europe, his publications cover such issues as policy, planning, financing and governance of higher education in Eastern Europe and various OECD countries as well as relations between higher education and industry.