East meets western prejudice

WEST European universities need their own Tempus cooperation programme to appreciate their eastern counterparts better, a leading Czech academic has warned.

Eva Valentov , director of the University of Western Bohemia international office, said mistrust of eastern and central European higher education was a bigger barrier to partnership than language.

"This mistrust is unfounded, and it is important our western partners overcome their isolation from the East as we have overcome our isolation from the West," she told the European Association for International Education's annual conference in Budapest. The conference, "On Equal Terms - new partners in international education" attracted a record 1,400 delegates from 62 countries.

Dr Valentov praised Tempus for helping central and eastern Europe internationalise education. But they still found it difficult to recruit western students, she said. Some Czech departments, notably in maths and physics, were hesitant about student exchange schemes, since they felt standards were lower in the west, she added.

Lesley Wilson, director of Unesco's European Centre for Higher Education in Bucharest, said eastern institutions found many western partners considered themselves to be academically superior donors of information.

Cooperation on equal terms meant each partner contributing something of value, for example, high-quality learners.

"On equal terms comes down to human relations, to respect, to listening to and understanding the needs of the other side, to trust and confidence and fairness in dealing with others despite objective differences in resources and experience," she said.

Higher education underpinned political, social and economic changes in central and eastern Europe, and despite cash constraints, it was still an attractive career choice for young high-fliers.

Peter Darvas, director of the Open Society Institute's higher education support scheme in Budapest, said: "There is not necessarily the immediate reward in terms of salary, but becoming an intellectual is a very rewarding career because of access to information. These societies are to some extent even more information-oriented than the West, because in this period of transition, information is the single most important asset."

Jonathan Becker, assistant vice president of the George Sorossupported Central European University in Budapest, suggested that the Internet and email helped prevent a brain drain, since when academics returned from exchange schemes in the West, they did not feel isolated.

But the hazards of new technology were highlighted by Kathy Plante, president of the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers. "Technology has made it easy to create bogus documents. Inexpensive computers can create documents that look just like the original," she said.

A recent association study had shown that up to 500,000 fraudulent records were submitted annually to colleges and universities in the United States. James Frey, president of American company Educational Credential Evaluators Inc, said people were also presenting authentic documents from illegitimate institutions or so-called diploma mills. He called for international help in listing the criteria for accredited institutions, which could then be used to identify those which were not recognised.

Both the Association of Commonwealth Universities and the German rectors' conference had lists of institutions of doubtful standing, but these were never made public because of fears of litigation. "This situation has hampered everybody," he said. "There's got to be some way to identify what the recognition process is for each country."

EAIE's president, Marianne Hildebrand of Sweden's National Agency for Education, said the European Union was contributing to a globalisation of higher education with cooperation projects with countries such as the United States, Canada, Japan and China.