Colleague to Finish Conroy Vietnam Task

A colleague of Ed School planner Vincent F. Conroy is going to Vietnam to complete the report which Conroy was working on at the time of his death.

Russell G. Davis, associate director of Harvard's Center for Studies in Education and Development, leaves for Vietnam today. He will stay there two or three weeks -- studying a 200-page draft of the report which Conroy had finished, discussing it with Vietnamese educators, and putting it in final form.

Conroy and seven Midwestern educators were killed March 23 when their plane, flying through a storm, crashed into the side of a mountain 20 miles north of Da Nang. They had almost completed a year-long study of Vietnamese universities and teacher training for the Agency for International Development. Conroy had taken on the job of writing their report.

Their study, financed by a $98,000 grant from AID, was the result of a one-week visit to Vietnam early last year by a special task force headed by John W. Gardner, secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. The task force recommended that a survey of Vietnam's educational needs be made immediately.

Davis was a member of that task force. According to associates, when Conroy first called Davis to tell him that he wanted to take part in the survey, Davis hung up in anger and disbelief. He unsuccessfully urged Conroy, who had suffered a heart attack several months before and was involved in several urban education projects at the Ed School, not to go.

A friend of Conroy's said yesterday that his letters indicated he was appalled at the degree that the Vietnamese bureaucracy, built on the tradition a Vietnamese attitude of deference to superiors, was stifling its educational system.

He had apparently convinced his colleagues that their report should be blunt in its criticisms -- not only of Vietnamese education but also of specific American decisions. One such decision was a recent order from the embassy in Saigon to cut off aid to the University of Hue because some students and faculty members had sacked a U.S. library there.

Daivs told AID last week that he would be willing to go to Vietnam to complete the report. He will be accompanied by two other educators -- T. C. Clark of AID and Burdette W. Eagon, dean of the College of Education at the University at the Wisconsin's Stevens Point campus. Three of the team's members were from the University of Wisconsin