Year of Russia
1996-1997
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Year of Russia 1996-1997
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Informatization in the Open Society
Address by Professor Alexander Kubyshkin
Volgograd State University, Russia
Delivered on 17 September 1996
At Steadman Theater, Mansfield University
Mansfield, Pennsylvania
President Kelchner, Vice President Moore, faculty, staff, students, visitors, and friends of Mansfield. Let me express my thanks to you for the opportunity to be present at this remarkable celebration. And let me express my admiration for the nice jazz music. In Russia we often say sometimes: To be happy, a man has to have three things: a German car, American jazz, and a Russian wife! So I have most of this: my wife Tatiana is here with me and I like American jazz very much.
Today's celebration is a great occasion not only for Mansfield university and Pennsylvania, but for all the friends of Mansfield everywhere, including Russia. Because North Hall is not only a new library in a wonderful old building, but it is a new center for informatization and for the increasing of mutual cooperation among different universities, countries, and peoples. We know that the opening of North Hall is a result of the good will and the hard work of many people. I hope that the new library will produce results for all that hard work. I hope it will become an intellectual magnet, attracting young writers and painters and musicians and dancers and students of philosophy and mathematics and psychology, and actors and business people and athletes and people from all walks of life, a center for intellectual communication and the development of mutual understanding. I hope it will be a nucleus which will nourish Mansfield University's progress and prosperity. I hope because of it Mansfield will promote an open society based on the transmission of knowledge and ideas.
In my country we have been seeking an open society for a long time and with much difficulty. At the end of the 16th century the Russian tzar Boris Godunov, the main character of the famous Russian opera by Musssorgsky, decided to send seven Russian students to Oxford, England. After their graduation they were supposed go back to Russia and to become the founders of the first Russian university. But tzar Boris died, civil war began in Russia, and none of these seven guys ever came back to the motherland, though some of them became famous figures of British educated society. So it was a sad end to the first Russian educational exchange program. It was more than one and a half centuries later when the first Russian university was founded in Moscow. And after the foundation of that university, it was two and half centuries more, in 1985, before my country began to transform itself step by step into an open society.
The freedom of getting information is the most important trend of an open society. People who are not free in their actions and their minds also cannot be free in the sea of information. And freedom of information can help crush totalitarian borders very successfully, as we have seen in the past ten years.
Everybody today, in your country and ours, understands the importance of informatization. When I say "informatization," I mean the process of transmission of information, the transmission of knowledge and ideas. Because of new methods of informatization, like the computers and the networks and the access to the internet in North Hall, towns like Mansfield are not any more what Mark Twain would have called "poor, small, one-horse towns," but they offer people many of the same things they can find at the largest universities and museums and galleries, the different sources of civilization. It impresses me very much.
So today we celebrate the beautiful new building with its access to the entire planet through the internet. But we celebrate also a new library, and that reminds us that we continue to believe in the power of the book. People in your country as people in mine believe, as I do, that the book remains a very important part of education, a central part, an essential part. The book continues to be more intimate, more stable than a web site, which may be here today and gone tomorrow. We change our computers every two or three years, but not our books. We keep our books from year to year. We carry them everywhere.
Many people in the USA and in Russia continue to believe that the ideas in books, the beauty in books, can help make us more free, more compassionate, more reasonable. It is interesting that even today in some closed societies leaders sometimes fight against some books and some writers, though the development of the internet makes these attempts almost hopeless and senseless. Some of these leaders have learned to control people through the internet. They use the new technology to increase their power over people. But they have not learned to do that with books.
Someday there may be a computer program or a web site with the power of Alexander Puskin's poetry or Emily Dickinson's poetry, with the power of War and Peace or Huckelberry Finn. The information revolution continues but it does not replace books. That's why what we're celebrating today is not the North Hall Computer Center but the North Hall Library.
And I am here today to help celebrate one final thing, I think as important a thing as the other two. We know that the computer network itself can not solve any global problem. Only people can do that. People who live in different social and political systems, with their historical, social, cultural, and religious traditions. Informatization is not a panacea, not a solution for all problems.
So we celebrate today three things, the new technology of North Hall, the continuing power of books, and, as the French writer Antoine Saint-Exupéry calls it, the magnificence of human communication, human contact, human exchange.
This year marks the fiftieth Anniversary of the Fulbright Exchange Program and I express my thanks to Mansfield University for the opportunity to join the international family of Fulbrighters. It is a fact that the Fulbright Program was founded in 1946, simultaneously with the beginning of the Cold War. It was a time of serious confrontation and rivalry between two different political and economic systems. A great American, a citizen of the World, as President Clinton called him, Senator Fulbright understood that the most effective method of defending the principles of an open society is the increasing of information, knowledge, and humanitarian values. In his book, The Price of Empire, published in 1987, Senator Fulbright wrote: The Fulbright educational exchange program "is a modest program with an immodest aim, the achievement in international affairs of a regime more civilized, rational, and humane... I believed in that possibility when I began. I still do."
Senator William Fulbright was quite right. He was right because the main goals of his program were defined by the high principles of democracy, human rights, and justice. Now the Cold War is over. Nobody has lost. Everybody has won. And the Fulbright Program is alive and prosperous, and it continues its hard job of the increasing of mutual cooperation and the relaxation of tensions.
This is my second visit to Mansfield. I was here for a few days in 1990. Many things have changed during these 6 years, and this time I come here from a new country, one that has changed not only its geographical borders but its political system too. It has been a hard six years for my country.
But during all this time, my friends here in Mansfield and in Volgograd and I have tried to maintain the interest of our Russian and our American students in the history, culture, science, and educational systems of our countries. So far, as a result of the exchange program between our two universities, more than 50 students and professors have changed places for a semester between Volgograd and Mansfield. Last year we founded a Center of American Studies at Volgograd State University where 5 professors and about 30 students have studied and done their research. Next year our Center will host an international conference devoted to the historical experience of mutual partnership between Russia and the United States.
In spite of all our difficulties and problems, we in Volgograd are fully resolved to continue strengthening the beneficial relations between our universities and the development of tolerance and friendship between our countries and peoples.
I hope I'll get to meet many of you as the year goes on. I hope you'll visit me in my office on the second floor of Pine Crest. I hope we'll have a coffee or tea together in Manser Hall and talk about things we both care about, maybe movies or music or politics. I hope through our conversations together, we'll find ways to strengthen the good will and the trust that is developing between the students and the teachers of our universities. I hope some day soon many of you will find a way to visit my university in Volgograd, to meet our students and our professors and our townspeople as this year I am meeting so many of you. I hope someday soon you and I will drink coffee or tea together at my university near the great Volga River and talk.
And now, as a symbol of our friendship and cooperation, let me offer to your new North Hall library a gift of several books written by scholars at Volgograd State University and published by our university press, and let me offer you two of my own books. Let these books deepen the process of informatization and lead to better understanding of our common goals for the future.
My family, my wife and son, and I are very grateful to all the people who gave us an opportunity to work in this remarkable university among you nice people, and we will do all that is possible to justify your confidence.
Thank you very much.