Czechoslovakia’s secret Cambridge students

You may be surprised to hear that one of the events to mark the hundredth
anniversary of the foundation of Czechoslovakia was held at the Faculty of
Divinity at Cambridge University in Britain. On October 29 a plaque was
unveiled commemorating a secret academic link set up between the university
and Czechoslovakia at the height of normalisation in the 1980s. Czech and
Slovak students who found themselves unable to go to university because
they or their families were out of favour with the communist regime were
given the opportunity to study secretly for a Cambridge University degree.
Under cloak-and-dagger conditions academics would travel to Prague to give
lectures at underground seminars on such hot political topics as the early
Christian church or New Testament Greek. David Vaughan picks up the story.

Published: 
Monday, November 26, 2018