Education: But Where Are Their Chaperones?

Killu Tyugu, 21, a thoughtful Soviet college student, remembers when the rector of Tartu State University in Estonia asked if anyone wanted to go to America. “Everyone laughed and said, ‘He is a humorous man.’ We didn’t believe him,” says Tyugu, a molecular-biology major. “But when he went on to ask, ‘Who would like to apply for an exchange program?’ I thought, Why not take a risk?” This autumn Tyugu is enrolled at Ohio’s Oberlin College, while 55 of her Soviet peers are at 25 other liberal-arts colleges in eight states. The arrangement is part of an unprecedented Soviet-American undergraduate swap that will send a comparable number of U.S. students to Soviet universities next fall.

Although Soviet students have occasionally been granted permission to study briefly in the U.S., this yearlong exchange represents a glasnost-era breakthrough that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. “Without perestroika, we would not be here in America,” says Imbi Hepner, a bouncy 21- year-old education major now at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. The program was initiated by three American college presidents — Olin Robison of Middlebury, Alice Ilchman of Sarah Lawrence and David Fraser of Swarthmore — who presented the idea to the Soviet Ministry of Higher Education last year.

The Soviets ultimately agreed to an exchange that is remarkably free of constraints: the visiting students have no chaperones; they live in ordinary dorms with their American peers, earn transferable grades and select courses on their own. In past cultural exchanges, authorities in Moscow wanted the U.S. Government to guarantee the return of visiting Soviet citizens (a request that was routinely denied). “There was none of that talk in these negotiations,” says Ray Benson, a Middlebury professor and former embassy attache in Moscow, who headed the negotiations. Tuition, room and board, and a monthly living allowance of $150 are paid by the host school. The cost comes to about $25,000 per visiting student. Soviet schools will cover equivalent costs when U.S. students arrive next year.

As participants in the exchange are discovering, the Soviet and American college systems are a less than perfect fit. Soviet students specialize much more during their five college years than Americans do in their four, and they take a rigidly prescribed sequence of courses. U.S. exchange students may therefore be discouraged by the lack of electives at Soviet schools. But the Soviets are astonished by the abundance of choices. One visiting student at Wesleyan signed up for a class in jazz improvisation; several are taking courses in Christian ethics, while others are rounding out their schedules with power volleyball and Nautilus instruction. “Knowledge is broader and more universal in American colleges,” observes Lyaziza Sabyrova, 22, who is now at Wheaton. Accustomed to narrow specialization, she was amazed to meet an American student who was combining majors in biology and art. “I think that’s so interesting!”

Before moving on to their respective schools, the Soviets attended a three- week program at Middlebury designed to ease culture shock. Mornings were spent studying English (fluency is required) and computers. Afternoons were largely devoted to lectures on such topics as the U.S. political system (with videos of the conventions), the economy and American literature and history. One student expressed interest in the writings of J.D. Salinger; another inquired about “the place of Indians in American history.”

The students are a diverse group with varying ambitions: several are married, with children; some, from such regions as Estonia and Latvia, do not speak Russian fluently. As they battled homesickness during their orientation period, many found solace in front of a campus VCR. During a showing of Platoon, the tiny TV room looked like a Tokyo train at rush hour. Erlan Sagadiyev, 21, who served in the army for two years, explained that the Afghanistan war had greatly fanned Soviet interest in the Viet Nam era.

As they settled into the first weeks of the semester, there were many surprises. At Middlebury, Sergey Plyasunov, 22, has discovered what it is like to study the Soviet Union “from the other side.” Says he: “I find out things that I didn’t learn in my own country about the highest powers like Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev.” Not all the teaching goes unchallenged. At Wheaton, Sabyrova takes issue with an American textbook that describes the Soviet economy as entirely planned. “It is wrong,” she insists. “With economic reform there are a lot of changes in our country.” Meanwhile at Oberlin, Killu Tyugu, who did not initially believe it was possible to study in America, is amused to find that her fellow molecular-bio students are poring over the same (U.S.-published) textbook she used back home. Typing away on an Apple computer, she revels in her good fortune: “Right now there seems no way to lose. Being a student seems to be fun on both sides of the globe.”