Bok Attends Berlin Conference With European College Heads

President Bok is returning from Merlia today, where he has spent the last week attending a conference of American and European University heads.

In an event sponsored by the exclusive Aspen Institutes, presidents from several countries met daily through yesterday to discuss issues such as academic freedom and technology transfer. While it is unlikely that any resolution will come out of the conference, organizers said it is intended to provide a forum for exchanging ideas.

The Aspen Institute for the Humanities is an international more profit organisation which holds regular seminars and meetings at live locations is that United States and abroad for top level executives in industry, government, education, and prevention.

Reached in Berlin earlier this week, Bok said the participants had "firm discussions" and found they shared many problems in running their Universities between American and German higher education saying "May be we can be of some help in providing perspective and ideas for German Universities."

Of special concern Bok said was the tight government control over German universities. He said he had found this led to uniformity of education among the country's universities and that Germany was dealing with "problems in adapting to educating a larger segment of the population."

Aspen officials said yesterday that it is likely that Bok visited East Berlin sometime during the week. They said that they encourage all participants to make the trip through the wall to see first hand the differences between East and West but they were unsure if Bok had decided to go.

Bok said other items on the agenda included questions of how to insure academic opportunities and relationships between academic scientific communities and private industry. In recent years Bok has had to deal repeatedly with the issue of technology transfer--a University's right to a professor's research--as various companies approached Harvard with offers to sponsor research in exchange for exclusive access to major discoveries.

"The idea is to bring together people who would not usually get to sit down together," said executive director of the McCloy Scholars programmers James A Cooney, who was deputy director of Aspen for four years before coming to Harvard.

Cooney said the conferences are limited to 24 participants and that while they my have a rough agenda, are meetings are held as informal roundtable discussions without prepared notes.

Our whole kind of basic organization is to get (participants) to discuss their values said Deborah D. Barron. Aspens's deputy director of the executive seminar.

It's to get them to investigate the real meaning of leadership. She said adding "It's to make them more conscious of their decision-making process and to get them to sit down with people who violently disagree with them."