Renewal of Central European Higher Education: Issues and Challenges

This article, serving as an introduction to four other papers on current problems of higher education in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia, could have several alternative (and perhaps more appropriate) subtitles: 'How to return to Europe?', 'The impossible task', 'Can it succeed?', 'Coping with a paralysing heritage', and the like. They would all express more or less adequately what might be called the common denominator of current or desirable (and indispensable) renewal or reform of higher education in Central and Eastern Europe. The terms 'issues and challenges' are undoubtedly less expressive and more neutral, hence their utilisation here. The present article, it should be stressed, is not based on an extensive research effort, nor on a thorough survey of the literature. The sources are essentially the other papers published in this issue, several visits to the four countries covered by these papers, including discussions with numerous individuals there, drawn from the academic world and ministries, as well as a few 'brainstorming' meetings with Western and Central European specialists in higher education. Analysis of developments in higher education in Central Europe [1] is virgin territory, which does not imply that excellent specialists in this area do not exist, in both the West and in Central Europe. They are not numerous, and their work (especially that of the ones living in the region) is not widely known in the West. A completely new situation has, however, arisen since 1989 [2]: data to which hardly anyone had had access suddenly became available; opinions can be expressed and confronted freely in public meetings and seminars; highly critical assessments can be published. Obviously most of the serious scholars on both sides have not had sufficient time nor the necessary resources to cope with this situation. Hopefully the gaps will start to be filled in the near future. In the meantime, the present article and this whole issue of the European Journal of Education are principally intended to contribute to the beginning of a more systematic process of analysis of higher education development in Central Europe.