Romanian-Polish academic exchanges in the 70s

This study is an introduction to the assessment of cultural diplomacy and inter-university history. I will try to contextualise the dynamic of the academic exchanges in order to tackle how the political factor determined university mobility, to identify the need and opportunity to establish partnership agreements between universities, to particularise personal initiatives in institutional and state framework, to draft up a repertory of inter-university agreements and a graph of the exchanges between students and teachers. In what concerns the sources used, I will focus on the University in Iaşi – considered a case study in this research – worth detailing given its complexity. The study confirms that politics represented the key factor in determining the cooperation relations in the field of education. Even under such circumstances, the existence of relations with other academic mediums and the possibility of getting ideas and persons to circulate represented undisputable benefits for the university teachers of Iaşi, as well as for students. They left us the inheritance of formative experiences, debates, published works, and translations about the culture and history of both states; dictionaries, and working tools. For the University of Iaşi, the level of the exchanges with Lublin ranked the second, after those with the University of Jena, during the timeframe analysed here. Whereas politically imposed, the Cooperation Agreement between “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University and the “Maria Curie-Skłodowska” University was quickly reified by the academic personnel of both states and turned into a vector of scientific and cultural dialogue.