As it celebrates its fourth graduating class, AUBG is fast picking up recognition and accolades. ''It is extraordinary how fast this university has caught on as an institution,'' said Avis Bohlen, the U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria. Savina Velkova, a Sofia native who graduated in 1996 and stayed on as director of cultural events, puts it simply. The university has had relatively mild teething pains. Local suspicions that Americans were starting a spy school had to be dispelled. Complaints have arisen from faculty members occasionally, apparently motivated by personal grievances.
Future funding is always a question.
A current headache is the threatened tax on U.S. aid in Bulgaria, an outgrowth of a wider commercial dispute between Washington and Sofia. Out of a graduating class of nearly 200 in 1996, nearly half have jobs with employers ranging from the Bulgarian Investment Bank to the Big Five accounting firms to advertising agencies. Another 50 are doing graduate work, most of them at big public universities in the United States such as the University of Oklahoma. Entrepreneurial graduates in Sofia have sold an innovative database to Swiss dentists. This record encourages AUBG's directors in their belief that they can create a new Westernized elite in the Balkans.