The collection and dissemination of social science information in the czech republic

摘要

The legacy of Communism still haunts much of the Czech academic system. The normalisation regime that sollowed the Soviet led invasion that ended the Prague spring in 1968 purged the universities of ideologically unreliable teachers and staffed them with politically loyal incompetents, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Some of the social sciences, like political science and economics, did not even exist in the universities. The implementation of the Soviet model that separates research in an academy of science and teaching in universities further aggravated the situation. A typical university degree requried about 30 hours of class instruction per week, with very little reading and writing and no research or other independent thinking requried. A PhD could take three months to complete and admission policies were heavily influenced by political considerations and simple corruption. The Academy of Sciences was staffed by scores of completely incompetent apparatchiki who were rewarded with sine curae for being reliable fools, and by few competent scholars who were considered too ideologically unreliable to impress young minds at the universities. Most significantly, the normalisation regime erected an informaiton iron curtain to block information from passing from West to East. Libraries did not buy Western books and journals and the border police were charged with confiscating smuggled printed materials. in comparison with Hungary and Poland, the academic situation in Czechoslovakia was worse due to the rigid character of the regime [1,2]