Academic Exchange with the Soviet Union

Abstract

United States and the Soviet Union during the last four years has been the role played for the first time by various forms of cultural exchange, of which the most widely publicized have been the tours by various dancing groups, distinguished artists, and musical organizations and bands, and the exhibits which each country has staged in some of the major cities of the other. In addition, a number of delegations of various kinds have briefly toured parts of the other country while their members have conferred with representatives of the same disciplines or fields. However, few Americans are informed concerning other kinds of cultural exchange between the two countries, those which involve graduate students and scholars. Thus, under an agreement between the National Academy of Sciences in this country and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a few scientists from the two countries have visited the other country briefly to visit laboratories, to examine research under way, and in general to become acquainted with their scholarly fields in the other country. A second small program of this kind reflects a 1961 agreement, just renewed, between the American Council of Learned Societies and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, under which a few scholars from the two countries (four in 1961-1962) may spend from a few months to a year studying and doing research in the other country. Probably the least known but most significant of the SovietAmerican cultural exchange programs is that which now enables