“Optimizing” Higher Education in Russia
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The Minister of Education from 2004 to 2012 was Andrei Fursenko, a personal acquaintance of Putin from his native St. Petersburg. Fursenko was a physicist who had turned to business after the Soviet Union and then entered government service. At a pro-government youth forum in 2007, he criticized the inertness of the educational system inherited from the Soviet past, which he was intent on transforming. That system, he opined, had stubbornly tried to make young people into creators; whereas the main goal of education should be to cultivate consumers who know how to make use of technologies and innovations developed by others.25
One of the reforms of this period was the designation of élite national research universities that received additional funding, part of the effort to promote basic research in universities and “international competitiveness.” Another programme introduced in the late 2000s and also aimed at diversification through the creation of an élite university sector was the formation of “federal universities” in Russia’s various regions. This involved the forced merger of hitherto separate, often very different, institutions, a process experienced very painfully by many teachers, who, in typical fashion, were not consulted. Along with the Moscow and St. Petersburg State Universities, that received a unique status in 2009, the élite tier eventually comprised some 60 institutions, about 12% of the public universities.26
The advancement of Russian universities in the “international educational marketplace” became an important goal of government policy. To that end, the government signed onto the Bologna process in 2003, leading to the replacement of the traditional five-year first degree with a four-year BA, that could be followed by a two-year MA course. The higher candidate’s degree (kandidatskaya—roughly a PhD) was, however, retained, along with the highest academic degree of Doctor. The avowed aim of this reform was to facilitate the international mobility of students and faculty. But it continues to arouse much criticism among university teachers, who complain that the resulting bachelor’s programme is merely a truncated version of the former five-year course of study that does not provide an adequate general higher education. Among other things, the bachelor’s programme is supposed to include a considerable amount of individualized student work, but the classroom teaching load of university teacher leaves them little time for individual student supervision.27
With increased state funding for higher education, teachers’ salaries improved in the second half of the decade but remained well below the average wage in many of Russia’s regions. An international comparison found that average salaries of Russian university teachers in 2008/09 were equal to only 60% of per capita GDP, far below the level of their counterparts in the vast majority of developed, and even poorer, countries.28 “Salaries really did rise between 2001 and 2011, roughly speaking from 10,000 to 30,000 rubles,” observed mathematics teachers R. Karasev of MFTI. But that still remained far from the amount needed to feed a family.”29
To make matters worse, in 2008 the old centrally-fixed wage scale for public-sector employees was replaced with a New System for the Remuneration of Work. This gave heads of hospitals, schools, and universities broader latitude in spending their allotted budgets. Money that they economized on designated functions could be used as incentives to stimulate the work of employees. How that was done was supposed to be negotiated with the employees. But in the absence independent trade unions, the new law gave rectors a virtually free hand. As a result, an inordinate part of the 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 established Rosobrnadzor in 2012, the Federal Service of Inspection and Control of Education and Science, a department of the 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 more appropriate.
10 On primitive accumulation and the resulting nature of the state in Russia, see D. Mandel, “Primitive Accumulation in Post-Soviet Russia,” M. Vidal, et al. eds., The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, Oxford University Press, N.Y., 2019, pp. 739-54.
11 J. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents, W. Norton, N.Y., 2002, ch. 5.
12 Banque européenne de reconstruction et de développement, Rapport 1998, cited in E. Kniazev, “Les problèmes nouveaux posés par la gestion d’une université russe,” Politiques et gestion de l’enseignement supérieur, vol. 14, n° 1, 2002, p. 121; T. Klyachko and I. Rozhdestvenskaya, Obrazovanie, Institut perekhodnogo perioda, Moscow, 1999, p. 4.
13 A. Smolentseva, “Challenges to the Russian academic profession,” Higher Education, 45: 2003, p. 397.
14 For a discussion of this issue, see A. Kosmarksii, “Universitety stali gibridom patriarkhal’nhykh demokratii s prepriniamtel’skikh avtokratiyamy: sotsiolog Mikhail Sokolov o tom, kak ustroena vlast’ v rossiiskikh vuzakh,” Indikator, Sept, 25, 2018, https://indicator.ru/humanitarian-science/intervyu-mihaila-sokolova.htm. (accessed Aug 21, 2019)
15 A. Smolentseva, op. cit. 409
16 Platonova and Semyonov, p. 344. In 2,000, 4,741 million students were enrolled in higher education, as compared to 2,790 million in 1995. In the state system alone, one third were by then paying tuition. A. Smolentseva, “Universal Higher Education and Positional Advantage: Soviet Legacies and Neoliberal Transformations in Russia,” Higher Education, vol. 73, no. 2, 2016, p. 21; Obrazovaniye v Rossiiskoi Federatsii: 2010, Moscow: Vysshaya shkola ekonomiki, p. 102.
17 See the section 3.e below.
18 J. Zadja, “Educational Reform and Transformation in Russia,” European Education, vol. 35, no.1, 2003, p. 69.
19 An significant exception in this period was the revolt of the students in the Faculty of Sociology of Moscow State University in 2007, in which the main issue was the low quality of education offered. See, Initsiativa gruppa Sotsfaka MGU “OD Group”(2007-2008), http://chronicles.igmsu.org/odgroup/.
20 Concern over a possible “return of the Communists” was a major concern of government leaders in the 1990s.
M. Goldman, The Piratization of Russa, N.Y., Routledge, 2003, p. 75.
21 N. Forrat, “The Political Economy of Russian Higher Education: Why Does Putin Support Research Universities?” Post-Soviet Affairs, 2015, vol. 32 no. 4, 2016, p. 12; B. Saltykov, ”Enseignement supérieur en Russie”, Russie. Nei. Visions, no. 29, Apr. 2008, p.16; C. Sigman, “Retour de l’État et formes de domination en Russie”, Revue française de science politique, vol. 66, 2016, p. 923.
22 OECD Country note (http://www.oecd.org/education/Russian%20Federation-EAG2014-Country-Note.pdf (accessed June 10, 2018)
23 Forrat, op. cit., pp. 11-12
24 A. Smolentseva, “Where Soviet and Neoliberal Discourses Meet,” Higher Education, 2017, Dec. 2017, Vol. 74, no. 6, p. 1100.
25 L. Mazurova, “Potrebiteli’ nynche v defitsite?” Literaturnaya gazeta, no. 32, Aug. 8, 2007.
26 C. Sigman, “‘Retour de l’État’ et formes de domination en Russie,” Revue française de science politique, no. 6, 2016, p. 925.
27 I. Kurilla, “Education Reform in Russia,” Russian Analytical Digest, no. 137, 2013, p. 2.
28 P. G. Altbach et al., ed., Paying the Professoriate a Global Comparison of Compensation and Contracts, Hoboken, N.J., Taylor & Francis, 2012, p. 30. M.A. Borovskaya et al., “Higher Education Institute Salary System as a Factor of Modernization of Education and Science in Russia,” World Applied Sciences Journal 30 (11), 2014, pp. 1678, 1680.
29 S. Dobrynin, “Ortogonal’nhyi fitzekh,” Radio Svoboda, Dec. 6, 2015. https://inosmi.ru/science/20151206/234702542.html (consulted Apr. 5, 2020). For an international comparison of university teachers’ salaries that situated Russia at the end of the decade well down at the bottom of a list of 29 countries, see P. Altbach et al., Paying the Professorate, N.Y. Routledge, 2012.
30 “V Moskve obsudili finansovuyu politiku Ministerstva obrazovaniya i nauki,” https://минобрнауки.рф/пресс-центр/11685 (accessed Aug. 8, 2018).
31 Forrat, op. cit., p. 26.
32 On new public administration in Russia’s universities, see C. Sigman, “La montée de l‘État-entrepreneur de l’enseignement supérieur’ et l’hybridation public-privé: l’exemple de la Russie,” Économies et sociétés, Cahiers de l’ISMEA, XLIV, no.4, 2010, pp. 581-602.
33 “Ob utverzhdenii plan meropriyatii (“dorozhnoi karty”) ‘Izmeneniya v otraslyakh sotsial’noi sfery, napravelnnie na povyshenie effektivnosti obrazovaniya i nauki’,” http://government.ru/docs/3391/. A modified “road map” was published on Apr. 30, 2014. https://rosmintrud.ru/docs/government/137.