“Optimizing” Higher Education in Russia. David Mandel
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new money went to the remuneration of administrators.
A teacher of higher mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MFTI) recalled of this period: “The price of oil began to rise, and the situation became somewhat more comfortable for teachers. But we began to notice a growing disbalance. Ordinary colleagues really did begin to receive a little more, although nothing commensurate with the income Russia was taking in from oil. At the same time, the administration was beginning to make very big money. In a remarkable article, professor Pokrovskii wrote that although everyone says our work is selfless, that we are doing very important work, we are paid next to nothing, while university administrations are growing fat. Several such articles appeared at the time, as people were becoming aware of the disproportion, which by 2010-12 had already assumed an ugly form.” It was only in 2017 that the Minister of Education and Science finally recognized this as a problem, though nothing much was done.30
The second half of the 2000s thus witnessed a deepening of the opposition between university teaching staff and administrations. Those elements of faculty participation in university governance that had appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union began to be eliminated. A 2006 amendment to the Law on Education introduced a new procedure for choosing rectors, who had until then been elected by university academic councils (uchenye soviety), themselves elected by the teaching staff. According to the new amendment, a government committee was to approve candidates before the election, allowing it to eliminate undesirables. In the élite national-research and federal universities, rectors were now appointed directly by the government (by the President himself, in the case of the Moscow and St. Petersburg State Universities). As a result, the choice of rector fell increasingly to “strong managers”, people with academic degrees but also with experience in business or government administration. Rectors of the élite universities are generally very wealthy individuals.
Finally, the charters of the élite tier of universities provided for the creation of new academic units to replace the traditional departments and faculties. While department directors and faculty deans are by law elected by faculty councils, the heads of these renamed units are appointed from above. Under pressure from the ministry, this change has proceeded across the university system.31
As a result, rectors and other top university administrators became solidly integrated into the state administration’s “vertical of power”. This has been a central element in the state’s reassertion of control over higher education. In the “vertical of power”, loyalty of state functionaries is assured through a combination of reward, the source of which, at least in part, is some form of corruption, and the threat of punishment. The high salaries of rectors and other top administrators, as well as the proliferation of administrative posts in universities, are integral parts of the neoliberal “new public administration” that has been imposed upon universities in many countries over the last decades.32 The paradox, of course, is that the “free markets” and “competition” that are extolled by the policy’s promoters require muscular state intervention to create and maintain them.
The Putin regime inherited a system of higher education that was chaotic and in clear need of reform. But the new government, with the added resources at its disposal, was determined to impose its own vision of the needed changes, without consulting the parties directly concerned, university teachers, in the first instance. The reforms were undertaken without even a semblance of public discussion, let alone democratic participation, an approach that would be maintained in subsequent years.
d. 2012-18: The May Decrees and the “Road Map”
Putin’s election campaign in the spring of 2012 for a third presidential term (after a four-year pause as Prime Minister) followed upon unprecedentedly large popular protests, which were provoked, among other things, by the falsification of the previous fall’s parliamentary election results. People were also angered and insulted by the blatant cynicism of Putin’s “castling move,” whereby, in order to avoid changing the constitution, he exchanged places with President Dm. Medvedev, who had been his prime minister until four years before. This, Putin let it be known, had been planned from the very start.
During the election campaign Putin made the promise, repeated after his election, to raise the salaries of university teachers to double the average wage of their respective regions. Then on December 30, the government published its “road map” for “Changes in the Social Sphere Aimed at Increasing the Efficiency of Education and Science.”33 That document announced, among other things, that 44% of full-time teaching positions in higher education would be eliminated over the next five years. In absolute terms that meant the loss of 140,000 of the existing 318,000 positions. The document justified this by a projected decline of the university-age population, as well as by its goal of raising the student/teacher ratio from the current 9.4 to the OECD average of 12.
The projected job cuts were widely—and, as it turned out, correctly—interpreted by teachers to mean that the promised salary increase, even if realized, would not be achieved through significant new funding but by intensifying the workloads of those who remained. Moreover, the independent university teachers’ union Univesitetskaya solidarnost’ (henceforth Unisol) pointed out that the decline in university-age population, a consequence of the dramatic fall in births during the depression of the 1990s, would end as early as 2018.34 As for the teacher/student ratio, it was observed that Russia’s university teachers, unlike those of most OECD countries, do not enjoy the support of teaching assistants. On the other hand, doctoral students (aspiranty) who teach are counted as teachers. As a consequence, the average OECD student/teacher ratio is a meaningless benchmark for Russia.35
Putin’s third presidential mandate and the appointment of Dm. Livanov as Minister of Education and Science brought an intensification of the policy tendencies of the preceding administration. Writing in 2014, Professor A.V. Mogilev of Voronezh State Pedagogical University compared Livanov’s policies with those of his predecessor Fursenko: “With the change of Ministers of Education, the pressure on universities not only intensified, but took on a completely different character. If under Fursenko we witnessed the incomprehensible, almost senseless, bureaucratic overturning and demolition of established university practices and traditions in teaching and administration—the introduction of the bachelor’s programme, the new educational standards, the purported competency-oriented approach, the never-ending rewriting of course plans and work programmes; then now, under Dm. Livanov, we suddenly see come to the fore a certain efficiency… Many lances have been broken over that university efficiency… But the parameters set arbitrarily by the ministry for last and this year’s monitoring are such that Stanislavskii would say: “I don’t believe.” 36
In November 2012, early in his ministerial mandate, Livanov, a physicist, who had been vice-rector and then for several years rector of the National Research and Technological University (formerly Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys), provoked the ire of teachers by suggesting to an interviewer on national television that low salaries among university teachers were to be explained either by the low quality of those teachers, which forced them to agree to so little; or by their taking on work in several universities and running among them. A third possibility, he suggested, was that the teachers were taxing their students. “In all three cases,” he concluded, “such a university cannot be considered to be functioning efficiently.”37
With the declared goal of ensuring quality and “optimizing,” but with a clear emphasis on economizing public funds,38 the government