Education: Cathedral of Know-How

Had he seen it rising above squat Moscow, Napoleon might have paused. For the 32-story Palace of Science, showpiece of Moscow State University, catches the visitor’s eye* as the Eiffel Tower does in Paris. A relic of Stalin’s appetite for Victorian skyscrapers, it comes off as just what he intended: the biggest wedding cake in the store window of Soviet education. Next year five U.S. professors will discover what such education means. Last week Columbia University began looking for volunteers to teach at Moscow University in the first formal professorial exchange between the two countries. What are they in for?

In all of dreary Russia, Moscow University (enrollment: 27,000) is one of the few visible convincers that a primitive nation is out to conquer space. Among its 420 full professors, it boasts 33 members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Famed for aerodynamics and mathematics, it relegates the humanities to the old university (founded in 1755) in downtown Moscow. Its real heart is the new (1953) Palace of Science, a vast complex of 37 buildings that sprawl atop the suburban Lenin Hills on the site of what—ten years ago—was a peasant village.

Profits for Peking. Paid to study for five years, a student need never leave the premises. He gets a private room at low rental; no Moscow hotel serves better food than his cut-rate cafeteria. He can warm his mind in the 1,200,000-book library, cool off in the massive swimming pool. His labyrinthine alma mater is a self-contained city, with 133 elevators and miles of columned marble corridors; its 45,000 rooms include 168 lecture halls and 1,700 first-rate laboratories. Geography students alone have 20 labs, featuring such (militarily) educational gadgets as special projectors for aerial photographs.

For 1,700 foreign students from 53 countries, most of them technology-starved lands, the Palace of Science is a cathedral of know-how. Few worship harder than 400 Chinese students, the biggest foreign group. They keep to themselves, deplore pleasure of any kind. One Chinese student made the mistake of skipping lunches and saving enough money for a radio. When his comrades got the word, he was severely reprimanded, told that all savings should go to “national welfare.” He promptly sold his little radio and sent the money to Peking.

Volunteers for Space. On hand this year are 15 American graduate students (and five wives), members of the second batch of Americans—13 more are at Leningrad University—to study in Russia under last year’s cultural agreement. As guests of the Russian government, they get a handsome 1,500 ruble ($150) monthly allowance, twice the subsidy Russia gives its own graduate students. They work hard (law, language, economics), and live well in comfortable dormitory rooms, but a stiff weekly inspection by the dust-hunting “sanitary commission” is a reminder of where they are. They are graded on cleanliness, and their manners are supervised. The Americans have been warned never to cross their legs in public (Nekulturno).

U.S. undergraduate capers would never do at Moscow University, where hard liquor is as rare as soft homework and posters warn girls that the road to hell is paved with Western cosmetics. Somber and sober, Moscow’s students know that the road to the Soviet heaven is paved with education—and five applicants are waiting to take the place of every expelled student. Moscow’s drop-out rate is an astonishingly low 7% (the overall U.S. rate is 40%, often due to lack of money). For Moscow’s science-impassioned students, the only alternative to honorable graduation lies in one of this year’s favorite extracurricular activities: applying for the distinction of being the first human shot into space. For U.S. professors, the sea of alert faces in a Moscow lecture hall is likely to be quite an experience.

*Though one unawed New Yorker once cracked: “Well, it’s bigger than P.S. 107, that’s for sure.”