“Optimizing” Higher Education in Russia. David Mandel
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Ministry of Education and Science. It was assigned the task of monitoring the performance of institutions of higher learning at regular intervals on the basis of some 150 indicators for each institution, with six to eight of these, depending on the year, considered critical. In 2012-13, 52 institutions were closed on the basis of Rosobrnadzor’s inspections and 373 satellites were either reorganized through mergers or shut down. The process continued in the following years, though at a slower pace.39
Few could deny the need to ensure the quality of higher education and to put some order into the chaotic situation that had arisen during the “wild nineties,” which, among other things, had witnessed the profound restructuring (some might say destruction) of the economy inherited from the Soviet Union and a major reorientation of the values and career aspirations of the university-age population. But Rosobrnadzor came in for harsh criticism from teachers for its formalistic, bureaucratic approach to evaluations, the inordinate amount of frenzied paperwork its inspections demanded form university staffs, the dubious quality of many of its “expert” inspectors, and, finally, the arbitrary, apparently politically inspired, nature of certain of its decisions.40
The counterpart to monitoring, whose purported goal is to weed out underperforming institutions, were new policies aimed at “promoting excellence.” One of the most notable of these was the “5-100-20” programme, launched in 2013 with the goal of five universities entering major global rankings of the top 100 universities by the year 2020. Initially, fifteen universities were chosen for special federal funding under this programme. Several more added in following years, while others were disqualified.
That university rankings have become a big business and have been the object of criticism for the dubious character what they in fact measure41 did not discourage the government. Many teachers, however, expressed their skepticism about the programme and about how the additional funding was being spent. M. Balashov, teacher of higher mathematics at MFTI, compared it to the New-Guinean cargo cult: “Many of my colleagues, myself included, can’t shake off the feeling that everything is being turned upside down in this project of ‘entering the top 100.’ After all, universities aren’t good because they’re in the top 100. On the contrary, they’re in the top 100 because they’re good.”
At a gathering of the supervisory boards of universities participating in the 5-100-20 programme in 2014, Minister Livanov decried the “ineffective administration that had been formed over decades” in Russia’s universities and that was holding back their development. For that reason, he explained, he had created supervisory boards in the participating universities, composed of business people and government functionaries, “people with experience in solving large-scale tasks.” They would become “in essence, the organs of strategic management of the universities, the analogue of boards of directors of big companies.” These boards would appoint the rectors. An assistant to Livanov let it be known that that innovation would soon be introduced in “all decent Russian universities.”42
Among the other important innovations of this period were the introduction one-year employment contracts for university teachers, as well as “effective contracts,” according to which a highly arbitrary bonus part of the salary, often equal or even greater than the guaranteed part, was made heavily dependent on publishing activity, with a special premium on publications in journals indexed in international citation databases.
And as one might surmise from Livanov’s words, no store was placed in faculty participation in university governance. And for all practical purposes, the elements of teacher participation that had appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union were eliminated in this period. And as before, these new reforms were adopted without consultation of the university community. Sociologist Zh. Toshchenko of Moscow’s RGGU (Russian State University for the Humanities) observed:
“When I began my career as a sociologist, I was impressed by the words of the director of one of Penza’s most successful factories, where problems not only relating to production but social questions, too, were resolved so well.
When I asked him how he managed that, he replied: ‘You can’t make people happy by deciding for them and without them what they need.’ Well, this education reform has been marvelously conducted without the teachers. Who needs them? Bureaucrats know themselves what people need. And so, all commands flow from above, fertilized by the grant-consumers that they finance, who churn out a vast amount of recommendations, norms, rules and standards in order to justify their existence.
Many of these energetic bureaucrats have not themselves experienced their teachings and methods. But they consider it possible to impose them on others. This reforming began, and is being continued, without any counsel from those who do the teaching.
In fact, we see before us a complete disregard for the teaching community. And the tendency not to consult the mass of teachers is also evident in the universities, where practices are far from any elementary respect of democratic principles. Teachers’ meetings to discuss matters, relating not only to teaching, but to any issue of university life, have ceased to occur.”43
The practical application of these reforms and their impact on the condition of university teachers are the subject of the following chapter.
1 M. Matthews, Education in the Soviet Union: Policies and Institutions since Stalin, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982, p., 147. A certain decline in the relative remuneration of academic staff began in the 1970s. A. Smolentseva, “Challenges to the Russian Academic Profession,” Higher Education no. 45, 2003, p. 409.
2 An “academic hour” is 45 minutes.
3 Mining was one of the highest paid professions (outside of the nomenklatura), and the nickel miners of Norilsk also received a hefty northern supplement.
4 V. Afanas’eva, “Pyat’ prichin po kotorym ne sleduet stat’ professorom,” Komsomol’skaya pravda, Mar. 20, 2017, https://www.kp.ru/daily/26655.5/3676180/ (accessed Aug 21, 2018)
5 D. Platonova, D. Semyonov, “Russia: the Institutional Landscape of Higher Education,” in J. Huisman et al., ed, 25 years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2018, p. 1.
6 Prosveshchenie—literally “enlightenment.”
7 A. Smolentseva, “Where Soviet and Neoliberal Discourses Meet: the Transformation of the Purposes of Higher Education in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” Higher Education, December, 2017, pp. 1096, 1098.
8 For a useful overview of the institutional changes in higher education in Russia since the end of the USSR, see D. Platonova and D. Semyonov, “Russia: The Institutional Landscape of Russian Higher Education,” in J. Huisman et al. (eds.), 25 years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries, Palgrave, London, 2018.
9 “Likhie”—literally “dashing” or “daring.” But in this case, “wild” seems