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Journal of Policy History 16.1 (2004) 99-116



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Party School:
Education, Political Ideology, and the Cold War

Christopher P. Loss


John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956 (University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
György Péteri, Academia and State Socialism: Essays on the Political History of Academic Life in Post-1945 Hungary and Eastern Europe (Columbia University Press, 1998).
Arthur L. Smith Jr., The War for the German Mind: Reeducating Hitler's Soldiers (Berghahm Books, 1996).
Timothy R. Vogt, Denazification in Soviet-Occupied Germany: Brandenburg, 1945-1948 (Harvard University Press, 2000).
Books also discussed: Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union: 1921-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 1979).

In 1949, Harvard history professor and liberal activist Arthur Schlesinger Jr. declared that the high-stakes global dimensions of the cold war precluded it from being resolved by conventional military means. The combined destructive capacity of the Soviet and American militaries ensured that the standoff between "free" and "totalitarian" societies would be won nonmilitarily, by the combatant most adept at winning the battle for the "minds and hearts of men." 1 As the principal state institution responsible for shaping citizens' hearts and minds, the cold war university surfaced as a vital [End Page 99] weapon in the worldwide war between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Of the two regimes, the Soviet Union was the first to purposely and inextricably connect university research and training with the total development of the modern state. Believing, as Vladimir Lenin did, that education was an indispensable tool for the lasting "communist metamorphosis of . . . [bourgeois] . . . society," the Soviet government embarked upon a furious two-pronged higher-education policy designed to spur rapid industrial modernization and the ideological indoctrination of a new cadre of proletarian elites. 2 The reorganization of the Soviet education system followed closely on the heels of the Communist Party's 1917 political ascendance, and gained unstoppable momentum a decade later with the launch of Josef Stalin's First Five-Year Plan. Seemingly overnight, peasant and working-class students emerged as the university's key demographic and the study and glorification of Marxist-Leninist ideology the badge of an educated citizen. To an extent unappreciated by contemporary scholars, the Soviet government's unprecedented remaking of the university into a state-coordinated "party school" devoted to political training as well as industrial research and development marked a radically new use for education in modern society.

The United States also turned to its constellation of higher-education institutions to help bring order to its industrial and political universe in the twentieth century. Prior to World War II, however, it was a contested union compromised by America's federalist political tradition and plural arrangement of public and private higher-education institutions. But the pursuit of ideological and militaristic mastery during World War II and the cold war narrowed the gap between the state and higher education, and in the process moved the university from the periphery to the core of American life. Yet scholars interpreted the relocation of the university vis-à-vis society in the Soviet Union and the United States differently. While they unhesitatingly portrayed Soviet higher education as a product and purveyor of Marxist ideology, American scholars and "educrats" balked at examining the liberal democratic ideological impulses that lurked behind America's cold war education agenda. 3 Indeed, aside from a rich literature tracing the rise and fall of McCarthyism's assault on academic freedom in the 1950s, the ideological treatment of cold war-era American higher education remains largely undeveloped despite copious evidence to the contrary. 4 Through federally supported education policies, commissions, and [End Page 100] programs—the GI Bill of Rights (1944), the Fulbright Act (1946), UNESCO (1946), the Truman Report (1947), the National Defense Education Act (1958), the Peace Corps (1961), the community college movement, and university-based international and area studies centers—Congress sought to strengthen citizen's political faith and to help the United States fight and win hot and cold wars alike...

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