Exchange Plans Develop With Leningrad Faculty

Five Harvard professors returned last week from Russia, where they made preliminary plans for an exchange program with the University of Leningrad. "We hope the program will begin next fall," said Merle Fainsod, professor of Government and spokesman of the group.

A Russian delegation, headed by Alexandrof, rector of Leningrad, will visit Harvard in May to negotiate the details. Other members of his group have not been announced.

This program, which is under the Lacey-Zaroubin Cultural Exchange Agreement, formulated last year, will include men on the faculty level. Short lecture visits and longer stays for research will also be included, according to Fainsod.

Other members of the returning Harvard group were Wassily W. Leontief, Henry Lee Professor of Economics; Albert B. Lord '34, professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature; Richard E. Pipes, associate professor of History; and John H. Van Vleck, Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy.

After a week at Leningrad the professors visited Moscow, where they were greeted by Topchiev, associate director of the Academy of Sciences, the highest academic institution in the Soviet Union.

The differences in the educational structure of the two universities makes planning such an exchange difficult, remarked Pipes. "No attempt is made at Leningrad to broaden students; instead they have five years of disciplined well-defined centralization," he added.

A minor problem according to Lord is language differences. "They read English quite fluently and well, but some have not had much speaking experience."

Van Vleck, who visited scientific laboratories, was impressed by "the enormous number of able and hard-working people." Three thousand are enrolled in the five year physics course at the University of Moscow. Both Leontief and Lord feel that the Russian educators know more about us than we do about them.