David Mandel

“Optimizing” Higher Education in Russia


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new money went to the remuneration of administrators.

      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.

      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.

      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.