Flight of the Intelligentsia

"Universities are a part of the workers' and peasants' state and must serve the construction of socialism." In these blunt terms, the East German government defines the functions of the nation's "institutions of higher education." In practice, the definition means that East German universities bar the "nonproductive" (i.e., politically suspect), bourgeois "intelligent sia" in favor of the loyal sons and daughters of the "peasants' and workers' class."

Last week, prodded by public protests from professional groups, East German officialdom took a new look at its educational policy. One of the policy's embarrassing results: East German students by the hundreds are slipping into West Berlin to seek the education denied them at home.

Social Record. Counting remedial "workers' and peasants' faculties," there are 46 institutions of higher education in East Germany, with an enrollment of 100,000. Admission to any one of them is controlled from East Berlin through local, politically oriented selection commissions. Under the government's present quota system, 65% of the nation's college students must be recruited from the "workers' and peasants' class," with priority for the remaining openings given to members of the "productive intelligentsia" (i.e., "deserving activists," "deserving teachers of the people," "deserving inventors," college professors), and to such heterogeneous categories as "recognized victims of fascism," inmates of orphanages, cum laude high-school graduates. Although high-school grades are in theory a determining factor, they actually have far less to do with a student's chances than his family background and his record of "social" (i.e., political) activity. The final high-school oral examination is a simple exercise in juggling the tortuous details of current party ideology.

Even if a "bourgeois" student survives his examination and proves socially acceptable (e.g., a member of the Free German Youth or the Para-Military Association for Sport and Technology), he still must make out on a 28% smaller monthly living allowance than a student from a farming or laboring family in the same general income bracket. (Living allowances are granted by the government to almost all students in institutions of higher education; tuition is free.)

Under all these conditions, some 1,300 boys and girls fled to West Berlin last fall; most of them enrolled for nine-month high-school refresher courses, then entered universities or technical schools. This fall ,he number of education immigrants will Drobably be even larger.

Social Duties. The East German government's concern at this loss of brainpower has been reflected in public protests, Drominently noted in the state-controlled Dress. Parents' delegations and a variety of professional groups have cried discrimination. Recently the Magdeburg Party mouthpiece Volksstimme reported that district doctors had protested the "bureaucratic measures and narrow-mindedness" that barred their children from the universities. Hemmed the East Berlin weekly Sonntag: "Once in a while professors, doctors, artists, or engineers complain that their children are not, without exception, enrolled in the universities . . . But one should not hesitate to say that some children of our intelligentsia withdraw themselves from their social duties ... It is up to the intelligentsia to educate its offspring towards our most important state tasks, thus bringing the wishes of the individual into consonance with a social demand."

Behind such gobbledygook was an apparent desire to sweeten the educational pill. One possible way for the "nonproductive" intellectual to skirt the quota system: by enlistment for a two-year tour of duty in the East German army.

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