A Soviet Enrolls at Harvard

About a year ago, a Harvard postgraduate student met a 17-year-old mathematician in the Soviet Union who wanted to continue his studies in the United States. They hatched a plan that may have seemed like just wishful thinking.

Could this student get permission to leave the Soviet Union? Would Harvard accept him as a student without SAT scores or official recommendations from his teachers? How would the fact that he is Jewish complicate the situation?

This week the student--Mikhail Katz of Kisinev-enrolled as a special student at Harvard, ready to improve his English and continue his studies in mathematics.

But Katz, whose father is dead, leaves two brothers behind in the Soviet Union and had to separate from his mother, who is awaiting clearance from the U.S. Department of State before she can enter the country.

"They want to make sure she is not a spy," Neil I. Koblitz, assistant professor of Mathematics, said Wednesday. Koblitz, who provided the admissions committee descriptions of Katz's academic abilities, is largely responsible for his admission to the College.

While in the Soviet Union, Katz smuggled an application to Harvard out of the country and last July applied for a visa to emigrate to Israel. He received permission to leave the country on December 4 and until arriving in Cambridge last week, spent two months in Vienna and Rome.

"Yes," Katz said this week, he had faced some religious discrimination in the Soviet Union, but he declined to elaborate on his reasons for wanting to leave the country.

L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of admissions, called the case "unprecedented on the undergraduate level." It is rare indeed for someone to go to the lengths that Katz did to study at Harvard.