IRON CURTAIN MBA
By Rahul Jacob

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Move over, Karl Marx. Hungary's premier university has dropped Das Kapital from its required reading list. And, this month, the reform-minded Magyars are launching the East bloc's first MBA program. The den of such capitalist intrigues is a 19th-century castle 15 minutes outside Budapest that houses the International Management Center. This is a joint venture between East and West in every sense of the word. Funds come from the chambers of commerce in Milan and Budapest, the Hungarian Credit Bank, the Soros Foundation in New York City, and the Reichmann real estate family in Canada. The school's Young Managers Program, which is affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh's Katz school of business, will enroll some 25 students this fall. Students will earn credits for ten months' work in Hungary. After that they will complete internships of at least five weeks with corporations, including Northern Telecom, Fiat, Daewoo in South Korea, and the Rockefeller & Co. investment firm. Many will then go on to Pittsburgh for an additional seven months of course work. The center's faculty is a cosmopolitan lot, consisting of 11 Hungarians and 14 professors from the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe. The school's director is Hungarian; the dean is American. Every class will be jointly conducted by a Hungarian and a Westerner. Says Imre Lovey, a Hungarian specialist in organizational behavior who recently visited the Katz school: ''Western professors bring a market-oriented, state- of-the-art approach. We will bring an understanding of the local economy and politics.''R.J.