AUDEM Past and Present

The origin of the Alliance of Universities for Democracy (AUDEM) dates back to the year 1990, when the United States Information Agency invited six rectors of Central and Eastern European universities on a study tour of a few U.S. universities. The six rectors were: Tamas Meszaros (Hungary), Panayot Bontchev and Lubomir Lilov (Bulgaria), Lionel Haiduc (Romania), Ladislav Kabat (former Czechoslovakia), and Andrzej K. Wroblewski (Poland).

At the end of a very successful tour, which started at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and ended in New York, the guests and hosts unanimously decided that it would be a good idea to create something more permanent as a final result. Thus, the plan to create the Alliance of Universities for Democracy was publicly announced during a press conference in the United Nations building.

The AUDEM Charter Conference took place in Budapest in 1990, and the Charter was signed by representatives of 41 universities (12 American, 11 from the former Czechoslovakia, 8 Hungarian, 5 Polish, 3 Romanian, and 2 Bulgarian). The purposes of AUDEM, as set forth in the Charter, were as follows:

• ■ to enhance the role of higher education in promoting democratic institutions, economic development including technology transfer, decentralized decision making, human health, sustainable habitation of the Earth, and common and moral social values;

• ■ to promote programs and activities rooted in university-based research, education, and service which will be multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary in nature, promote information dissemination including public access to results of research, focus on community and national development, be action outreach and/or policy oriented, establish or enrich institutional infrastructures, and promote international partnership between students, faculty, and administration in higher education;

• ■ to provide means by which problems common to such university-based activities can be discussed and clarified and a mechanism for the joint consideration of problems of research methodology and the availability of data; and

• ■ to provide for meetings of the membership, at least annually, for the discussion of all those problems typically faced by the membership, both with respect to the subject matter, the research and service activities, and with respect to problems of international operations.

• ■ (Alliance of Universities for Democracy, 1990, p. 2)

In my opinion, during the twenty years of its activity, AUDEM has been successfully addressing most of the listed items.

In the following years, AUDEM grew very quickly. In 1992 there were 71 member institutions, in 2000, 105 and in 2003, 104 institutional members from 19 countries (Albania, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Republic of Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United States).

After the Charter Conference there were conferences in Prague, Budapest, Krakow, Nitra, Warsaw, Vilnius, Bratislava, Pecs, Cluj, Timisoara, Katowice, Belgrade, Yalta, and Istanbul—the list is not exhaustive, but illustrates the diverse membership and supporters of the organization.

Until 1999, the headquarters of AUDEM remained at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with Dave Hake as the president and Evans Roth as vice president for the United States; then moved to the American University in Bulgaria, whose president, Julia Watkins, became the president of AUDEM. In 2002 the presidency transferred to John Ryder from the State University of New York.

My own university, the Warsaw University of Technology (WUT), was one of the founding members of AUDEM—we signed the AUDEM Charter at the Charter Conference in 1990. Shortly afterwards I joined the Board of Directors, and remained its member until 2003 (most of the time as vice president for Europe).

This long experience gives me some perspective to compare the aims of AUDEM at its birth and its present. In spite of all the changes in the membership and conference locations, the main issue remains unchanged: How can universities promote democracy? May I be allowed to quote here my own opinion, expressed at one of the past conferences: “The universities should teach that truth is only approached by constant trial-and-error procedure, that to pursue the truth one should be open minded and tolerant, prepared to observe and analyze, to have courage to profess and protect one’s views, but in the same time to have respect...