nyt archives:

"February 23, 1982

ABOUT EDUCATION
By FRED M. HECHINGER
THE United States suffers from a serious depletion of expertise on
Soviet and East European affairs. The Soviet Union is estimated to
have three times as many academic specialists examining American
foreign policy as the United States has engaged in the study of Soviet
foreign policy.

A detailed report released this month by the International Research
and Exchange Board warns that, as far as Soviet policies are
concerned, ''the gaps in our knowledge are enormous, and they are
growing.''

''In the absence of serious, carefully researched studies,'' the
report says, ''our view of the Soviet Union is shaped increasingly by
popular impressions built from superficial reflections on the Soviet
actions that most catch the eye, and traditional habits of thought.''

Observers of foreign area studies, a field in which American
universities used to excel, point out that the new deficiencies in
graduate programs on Eastern Europe are an indicator of the overall
decline in advanced studies of many other regions that could become of
crucial importance overnight to American policy makers. Cuts in
Federal support of graduate education are expected to make matters
even worse.

The IREX report, compiled by three American specialists on the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, charges, ''Were we to search the country's
universities and research organizations, we would not find a single
person who has studied closely the last 10 years of Soviet policy in
Southern Africa, toward NATO, or on the evolution of international
economic relations.''

IREX, founded in 1968 by the American Council of Learned Societies and
the Social Research Council, is a nonprofit organization that
administers exchanges of advanced research with socialist countries.
Its report, Foreign Area Research in the National Interest: American
and Soviet Perspectives, is available for $5 from its headquarters,
655 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017.

Walter D. Connor, director of Soviet and East European Studies at the
State Department's Foreign Service Institute, recalls in one of the
report's papers that in the 1950's and 1960's great progress had been
made in Soviet and East European studies, largely a result of Federal
funds.

The accomplishments of that era, Mr. Connor says, were undercut,
first, by students' objections to military-oriented studies in the
late 1960's and, currently, by fear of the poor job market for
Ph.D.'s.

The result, he adds, has been a misleading picture of the need that
universities and the country have for specialists in those vital
areas. The National Council on Foreign Language and International
Studies estimates that, at the very least, 1,660 highly trained Soviet-
East European specialists, not including high school language
teachers, are immediately needed in academia, government and the
private sector, as against 1,074 now available.

The deficit in economists who specialize in those areas is estimated
at 100, about the number now in this field. Similar shortages exist in
sociology, political science, history and languages. ''If contemporary
events are any indication,'' Mr. Connor says, ''the U.S. will have to
pay much greater attention to trends in Poland, Yugoslavia, Rumania
and other states in the area,'' and the need extends to such
disciplines as anthropology, geography, science, technology and
energy.

As a case in point Mr. Connor cites the Polish crisis. He warns that
timidity about going beyond the Polish scene and about examining
reasons why similar events are likely or unlikely to occur elsewhere
''serves academia's broader audiences as poorly as adventurous,
careless guessing.''

One reason for these miscalculations in the need and job opportunities
for specialists, Mr. Connor believes, is that the Government typically
calls for narrow expertise and quick, specific answers to problems,
such as those involving Rumanian petroleum, Soviet dissidents or
Yugoslavia's debt. This, he says, creates a lack of perspective that
discourages the support of broadly based scholarship.

Robert Legvold, Soviet specialist of the Council on Foreign Relations,
says that if the Secretary of State were to call together all the
people in the Defense Department, the State Department, the Central
Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council who are expert
on Soviet policy toward a key country, such as West Germany, or a key
region, such as Asia, ''They could meet around a card table.''

''Rarely is there any part of the world where Soviet involvement is
the continuing concern of more than one or two individuals,'' he adds.
''All too often it is the concern of none.''

While the United States has ''a small but impressive nucleus of
specialists who deal with Soviet perspectives'' on military and
security questions, Mr. Legvold says, ''in other areas we have
virtually no resources.''

As examples, he said, ''We have no major study of the evolution of
Soviet policy toward SALT since the process began 12 years ago; no
major study of the Sino-Soviet conflict since the late 60's; no
significant study of Soviet policy in Africa in the 70's, and, most
amazingly, no even moderately ambitious study of Soviet policy toward
the United States over the last decade.''

Mr. Legvold looks back with nostalgia to the 1950's and 1960's, when
such scholars as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Marshall Shulman and Donald
Zagoria produced major works on the Soviet Union, mainly by combing
the literature. He deplores the fact that in the last decade too few
scholars have availed themselves of the much greater opportunity to
deal directly on their home ground with Soviet scholars, experts,
journalists and even diplomats.

At the same time, the Soviet Union has belatedly built up its American
studies. Over the last decade the Soviet Institute of the U.S.A. has
grown to include more than 350 specialists in all aspects of American
domestic and foreign policies.

Daniel C. Matuszewski, associate director of IREX, concludes that
while Soviet denunciations of the United States are almost always
ideological, ''Many Soviet international relations specialists
genuinely disdain certain schools of Western analysis for what they
feel to be their comparatively primitive and almost exclusively
military focus. In their view American attention to the social,
economic, cultural and other broadly political variables is woefully
inadequate.''

TO JEST TEN LINK,KTORY TU FUNKCJONUJE A POLACY JUZ ZAPOMNIELI - KIEDYS
PAMIETALO SIE IDEE ZAMOJSKIEGO LEPIEJ. ONI ( BUSZ I SPOLKA ) SA TERAZ
REAKTYWNI- JEST JUZ WIELE ARTYKOLOW O POLSKIEJ EDUKACJI - ZEBY NIE
PRZEOCZYC TYM RAZEM!

 JA MIESZKALAM W POLSCE KIEGY EDUKACJA POWOJENNA DOSTALA ZASTRZYK
DZIEKI OWCESNEMU MINISTROWI EDUKACJI I ...MNIE. ONI ODKOPUJA TO !
 ( POD : "SKUTKI TENNEBERGA")