O CHI MINH CITY - As Vietnam tries to stoke its fledgling private sector while remaining a one-party Communist state, Harvard University has emerged as an important player in coaxing Hanoi into the global economy.
Harvard's Institute for International Development runs the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program in Ho Chi Minh City, teaching applied economics to government officials and the leaders of state-owned enterprises.
It is part of the international exchange program started by the late Senator J. William Fulbright, an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam. Established in 1995, the Fulbright program here is sponsored by the State Department, and its $1.5 million annual budget is funded by Congress.
At the Fulbright center, located downtown near the headquarters of the Communist Party, loyal cadres learn about capitalism. In another bit of irony, many of the 55 students who pass through the program each year live in an adjacent dormitory that was headquarters for American nurses in the war years.
The government donated land for the center, which consists of three classrooms, a library, a computer lab, a study area, and offices, all encircling a courtyard. The faculty is made up of 10 foreigners and 14 Vietnamese, plus a group of tutors and translators. They use a team-teaching approach, in which courses are taught in English by American and Vietnamese instructors, with translators on standby. when needed. The curriculum is ideologically neutral.
''Since economic reform is by definition a process of decentralization, helping people at the local levels develop an ability to analyze and then create sound policy is critically important,'' said Lora Sabin, the program's academic director, who is from Watertown, Mass. ''Also, by bringing Americans and Vietnamese together in a learning environment, the program helps heal the wounds of war, and helps Americans to see the Vietnamese as people, just like us. This might, after all, be the most important thing we do.''
The government here, still wary of official Washington, is enthusiastic about its ties with Harvard.
''The program helps fill an important need in Vietnam's development,'' said Dao Cong Tien, vice president of Vietnam National University here, which has a cooperation agreement with Harvard. ''By providing high-quality educational opportunities for Vietnam's midlevel managers, the Fulbright program helps develop a core of managers capable of working in a fast-growing market economy.''
Students say they like the hands-on methodology of the program, the individual attention, and the breadth of the curriculum. ''There are subjects offered in this program, like micro and macro economics, that I haven't had a chance to study before in any depth,'' said Kim Phuong, 42, a lecturer at Vietnam National University's College of Economics. ''This is the basis of knowledge I need to develop my area of study.''
HIID also runs a science and technology and an academic exchange program, which are expected to be taken over by the Kennedy School of Government after the institute is dissolved in June.
The Fulbright program, besides being funded by Congress, has also been endowed by the Ford Foundation, Nike, and Arnold Hiatt's Stride Rite Foundation.
''The most interesting thing about the program is that it has an enormous amount of political independence inside a country that's very closed,'' said Thomas J. Vallely, director of Vietnam programs for HIID. ''It's a school about globalization. Castro wouldn't go for this in 100 years. We teach open economies and how to manage them. They're still confused in Hanoi about whether they want to have an open economy or a closed one, but they allow us to teach about an open one.''
