David Mandel

“Optimizing” Higher Education in Russia


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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

      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.

      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.

      The practical application of these reforms and their impact on the condition of university teachers are the subject of the following chapter.