Education Abroad: Americana at Salzburg

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A Glasgow youth with a Scottish burr sat in an Oxford college common room, impressing English listeners with his knowledge of U.S. politics. He even cited presidential election statistics in key Midwestern districts. "Where did you study in the States?" he was asked. "I've not been to the States," he replied. "But I've been to Salzburg."

That was enough. The Salzburg Seminar in American Studies has become widely renowned among European scholars, journalists and rising bureaucrats as one of the liveliest and most respected educational experiences available. Launched in 1947 by a group of Harvard students appalled at the lack of knowledge in Europe about U.S. institutions, it now has turned out some 5,000 graduates, will conduct its 100th seminar next month.

Unpaid Faculty. Such intellectuals as Harvard's President Emeritus James B. Conant, Historians Henry Steele Commager and Richard Hofstadter, Anthropologist Margaret Mead and Economist Walt W. Rostow have voluntarily served on the Salzburg faculty without pay. Seminar topics are U.S. art and culture, the political, economic and social structure, education, and—every year without fail—"American Law and Legal Institutions."

European schools, plus increased travel, have somewhat closed the knowledge gap about the U.S., but Salzburg's freewheeling atmosphere still conveys a vital sense of the mood that motivates education in America. "For the first time in my whole six years of higher education, I've had a chance to talk to a professor man to man," recalls one Salzburg graduate, accustomed to Europe's academic formality. Opinions flow so freely at Salzburg that a Yugoslav seminarian once pulled a knife on an Italian. By contrast, a Norwegian fellow spotted a German at whom he had thrown a hand grenade during World War II, and they became intellectual buddies.

Double Trial. Salzburg draws its fellows largely from rising professional people and civil servants in 15 countries. Tips come from alumni and ministerial or educational authorities. The present 54-man Seminar, on U.S. law, includes three West German judges and seven women; Federal Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans is one of the teachers. Each student pays $80, but the Salzburg Corporation estimates that it spends some $500 on each student, gets the difference from the Rockefeller, Ford, Kellogg, Commonwealth and Avalon Foundations, plus private U.S. corporations and individual donors. Some 45 lectures are jammed into each four weeks, followed by afternoon talkfests in which the lectures are expanded or shredded. A main attraction is a 15,000-volume library of Americana.