PSU Magazine Fall 1990

111 GLASNOST CONNECTION Our initial MBA-level class of 25, beginning in September, is likely to include I0 Soviets from Kabarovsk and 15 others from eight administrative units bordering the Pacific Ocean. We have a comm itmen t to serve the entire region, and we'll also have a secondary campus establi shed in Vladivostok , about 400 miles sou th of Kabarovsk and just north of North Korea. It 's a very ambitious program. We are gratefu l that the Meyer Memorial Trust has given us enough money to fund a good part of our program ' s first year. In add iti on, we have strong support from the business and government leadership in the Soviet Far East. Since we began this instructional e ffort, other educational institutions have claimed they are the first to bring Western-style graduate business training to the Soviet Union. We have verified with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Informat ion Agency that our program is the first of its kind in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Other schools are either bringing Soviet managers to the Un ited States for training, o r providing U.S. instructi on in the USS R at less than the master's degree level of course work. We fee l the future needs there are so great, that meeting those needs is going to have to be done by the institutional structures in the Soviet Union. Along the way, we are going to be retraining the ir fac ulty members here. Sure, we want the managers we instruct over there to go out and use our Western business tenets. But we also need to bui ld up the ir ed ucational institutions and their capability to teach the ir own people. You're not going to be able to haul a ll JO-million Soviet managers out of the Soviet Union and bring them over to the United States to train them! They're go ing to have to be trained and educated on a part-time basis, and it 's go ing to have to be done quickly, and mainly on the ir home ground . I pred ict that this will never be an easy process, ei ther for us or for them. I ex pect a lot of problems in terms of finding the best way to teach. I expect lots of financial struggles. We ' ll be funding our effort partly from thi s country, and partly from collecting rubles over there. Anybody enteri ng the Soviet Union and doing any kind of business has to understand you are entering a hi ghly unstable political , soc ial and economic environment. And I think you just have to accept that and adjust your activities according ly. I' ve often to ld people that if I ever write the autobiography of my experiences, including my efforts with SASPA , it' s going to be called "The Telex from He ll." That's because whenever I come to my office at PSU and our classes are percolating in the Soviet Union, I get telexes about three times a week from my cont acts over there. Invariabl y, they include a li st of 10 or 12 items, and five of them are new problems that we have to deal wi th . Sure. we have down periods, but we neve r say that thi s idea is not going to work . To some ex tent , my early invo lvement with thi s program was to deliver the message that our task was going to be arduous, and that we should understand thi s before we even start down the road. But I also stressed that thi s was a task worth doing. We are now caught up in the essential need for thi s program. And a ll who are involved agree that it is vitally important to the United States, to the Pacific Rim and to the world, not just to the Soviet Union. 0 Return to a past homeland The PSU /Soviet connection has another vital link some 4 ,000 miles west of Khabarovsk in the Republic of Estonia, where Professor Thomas Palm is bringing U.S. business know-how to people who have been under the Soviet economic system for the last 50 years. Thomas Palm PSU10 A By Kathryn Kirkland s a ch ild, Thomas Palm, his sister and parents fled the ir native country Estonia. The family left to escape Stalin ' s regime for a new life in Hitler's Germany. " It wasn't much of a choice," Palm sad ly explains. The Palms, who never accepted German ci tizenship, spent the years after World War II in United Nations displaced persons camps. In 1949, only Thomas and hi s mother could emigrate to the United States. Hi s sister had died of starvation, and his fa ther, crippled while serving in the German army and now too ill to travel , died before he could join the family in America. Now a professor of economics at PSU, Dr. Palm returned to Estonia as a touri st in 1983 for the first time in 39 years. His subseq uent visits have been by professional