Abstract
This study is concerned with understanding the depth of changes made at a Czech economics university after the 'Velvet Revolution' of 1989. This revolution cast off a totalitarian form of social and economic management that had heavily restricted the former Czechoslovakia since the end of the Second World War. Prior to 1989 Czechoslovakia was all but closed to the West. In the field of university economics, heavy emphasis was placed on the teaching of ideologically based Marxism-Leninism over other forms of economic thought.
The Revolution signalled the start of a neo-liberal reform programme entitled 'Shock Therapy.' This programme, referred to as the 'transition', sought to devolve economic decision making, once the preserve of central government, to the individual operating in a marketplace. For the university, this involved a transition from an ideologically based system, to one where academic freedom is an important part of life. Twenty-one Czech academics teaching in the field of economics were interviewed in the course of this study using semi-structured interviews. They were questioned as to how the university had made the transition from teaching Marxism-Leninism to teaching modern economics. A key assumption of this study is that the state of the university in a transition economy is an indicator of the depth of the transition itself. The findings indicate that the transition was a difficult process – personnel issues, foreign language deficits, resources constraints and lack of money for higher education all made the profession difficult to work in. A higher education law that devolved power to the university meant that academics that had developed a set of behaviours under the totalitarian system reverted to same under pressure of circumstance. The result: that reform efforts inside the university became superficial.
This activity is compared to Hayek's (1944) (1988) critiques of the socialist construction of a new system. This shows that the superficial reform activity had a neglect for past forms at its basis. This is used to demonstrate what Sojka et al. (2000) consider to be a 'Marxist vulgarisation of Hayek' in the transition, and the superficiality of the wider Shock Therapy reform programme.