PARIS—Czech universities and institutes of the country’s Academy of Sciences may be permitted to conduct research for industrial clients along the lines of a model already established in Yugoslavia and beginning in the Soviet Union. Speaking at the Czechoslovakian Science and Technology Information Center here, the president of the J.E. Purkyne University in Brno said that the five-year plans covering the nature and funding of applied research may be modified to permit such contractual arrangements. President Bedrich Ceresnak noted that research in his country has become increasingly oriented in the past decade toward solving problems relating to energy, agriculture, medicine, ecology and the chemical industry. Czechoslovakian forests have suffered perhaps most of all Europe’s vegetation from the effects of acid rain.
Touching on various changes in higher education, Ceresnak said that engineering schools have shortened their curricula from five to four years “because of the sheer perishability of some instructional...