Algirdas Avizienis remembers the day in March 1950 when he first saw the skyline of Chicago.
He was 17 years old, a refugee from wartime Lithuania, and had just arrived by train from New York after 10 days crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard a U.S. troop transport ship called the Gen. Greeley.
Avizienis had managed to finish his high school education despite the war and the Soviet occupation of his country that shattered the world in which he grew up.
He had even learned enough English to work as a interpreter for U.S. troops screening people in the United Nations refugee camps where he spent part of the war and then again during the trans-Atlantic crossing.
But now he was in America, a refugee like hundreds of thousands of others, and quickly discovered what it was going to be like building a new life in a new land.
”I spent the first year making mattresses,” Avizienis said, recalling his early days in Chicago working at a factory on 22nd and Halsted Streets.
That was 42 years ago, and now, after nearly a half-century during which Avizienis built a career as a pioneer in computer engineering, he has returned to his native Lithuania, to the city where he was born, to rebuild a part of the world of his youth-the world of liberal arts education.
When Avizienis was a boy growing up amid the linden trees and church steeples here in the heart of Lithuania, this city was a vibrant place bustling with ideas and filled with the voices of students from all over Europe.
Those voices, echoing in a melange of Lithuanian, Polish, German and Russian, were resonant with the somber melodies that haunted the Central Europe of Avizienis` youth.
He was 7 years old when World War II began its sweep across the continent. Within months, Lithuania was under Soviet control as a result of a secret pact between Hitler and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
It was only a few months more before the new communist rulers of Lithuania began to silence those voices. Among their first steps was to crack down on the center for free thought in Kaunas, the Vytautas Magnus University. By the time Avizienis was starting his college studies at the campus the University of Illinois then maintained on Navy Pier in the early `50s, the Soviets had closed the Vytautas Magnus and ended liberal arts education in Lithuania.
Now Avizienis is rebuilding that part of his past.
For two years, Avizienis has been rector of the re-established Vytautas Magnus, two years during which he has transformed the shattered institution into a thriving university with 1,400 students studying under an American model curriculum.
”I think everybody in academia dreams of such a thing,” he said.
The road back to the city of his birth and to Avizienis` latest challenge ran through the center of Chicago.
Avizienis earned his undergraduate and master`s degrees as well as his doctorate from the University of Illinois while his father-a former officer in the Lithuanian army-worked as a cabinet maker.
”We lived at 18th and Halsted, a half-block from the Providence of God Lithuanian Church,” Avizienis said. ”Cabinet making had been my father`s hobby when he was an army officer, and so I guess he was pretty lucky to do such work.”
Avizienis split his time between his parents` home and the University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign, where he studied under some of the pioneers of early computer science.
In 1954 and 1955, he started taking courses being taught by the men who had built one of the earliest major computers-the Illiac I at the university. ”This was absolutely the luckiest thing in my life,” Avizienis said.
During a hiatus in his studies at the U. of I., Avizienis went to the California Institute of Technology to work on a government-funded project to develop computer systems for nuclear missiles.
A window of opportunity
They were still designing missiles at Cal Tech when he finished his Ph.D. studies in Urbana-Champaign and returned to California in 1960, but this time for different uses.
”By then NASA had been set up,” he said. ”When I got back, I found out that we were building interplanetary spacecraft.”
For the next 30 years, during which his native land remained solidly locked in the grip of the Soviet Union, Avizienis kept up his contacts inside Lithuania through scientific exchanges with the Soviet-established Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.
Then, in 1988, things started to change.
Mikhail Gorbachev`s reforms had progressed far enough by then to open a window of opportunity for those seeking to restore Lithuania`s statehood.
The independence drive was led by a coalition of forces that united under the Sajudis movement, and by 1989 Lithuania had gained sufficient freedom to sponsor a conference on higher education and the possible reopening of Vytautas Magnus University.
Avizienis delivered a paper on the structure of the University of California and urged that an American-style university be established here.
Before the conference was over, the participants had voted to reopen the university and, after a year of leadership by committee, Avizienis was appointed rector with a brief to establish an American curriculum with English to be the main language of instruction.
”The first year (1990-91) was much improvisation,” Avizienis said.
A different approach
Confronted with decades of stolid Soviet rote learning that had been imposed in the place of liberal arts education, Avizienis had to demonstrate to students and teachers what a Western-style university was all about.
”What we were trying to say was that it was possible to do it differently,” Avizienis said.
The lesson was quickly learned.
Starting with just 180 students, ironically studying in what used to be the Communist Party`s school for top officials, the university has expanded to 1,400. With faculty from both the United States and Lithuania, the university is pressing toward a goal of 2,000 undergraduate and 400 graduate students within five years.
Students range from anxious 17-year-olds to one 70-year-old man who is earning his second undergraduate degree. His first was from the same university-before the Soviets closed it down.
Many problems, however, remain for Avizienis, including the funding of an institution he wants to be an independent one.
So far, all of the money to run the restored Vytautas Magnus University comes from the government. Students pay no tuition.
This is something Avizienis is anxious to end.
Although he has had some luck seeking donations from Lithuanians abroad, the money has so far amounted to little more than a trickle.
”So far the we have not found a millionaire willing to fund an endowment,” he said.
