Читать книгу “Optimizing” Higher Education in Russia - David Mandel - Страница 8

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.

34 “Kak raspoznavat’ i borot’sya s massovymy uvolneniyamy PPS,” http://unisolidarity.ru/?p=490. (consulted Mar. 30, 2017)

35 V. Perfil’eva, “Vas proveli po konkursu na odin god ili zaklyuchayut srochnyi trudovoi dogovor?,” Universitetskaya solidarnost’, 22 Aug. 2015, http://unisolidarity.ru/?p=3749 (consulted June 5, 2017).

36 K. Stanislavskii, renowned Russian and Soviet theater director, when dissatisfied with an actor’s performance, would comment: “I don’t believe!” A.V. Mogilev, “Effektivnost’—eto vam ne igrushka—i nam tozhe,” Jan. 27, 2014, http://unisolidarity.ru/?p=1756 (consulted June 5, 2017)

37 “Livanov o zarplatakh prepodov,” http://phdru.com/paycheck/livanovsalary/; “Ministr obrazovaniya otsenil uroven’ prepodavatelei po ikh zarplatam,” https://www.ntv.ru/novosti/369807/ (accessed June 15, 2018)

38 “Dmitiri Livanov i vuzy: optimitizatsiya vmesto obrazovaniya,” Kapital strany, May 15, 2013. http://kapital-rus.ru/articles/article/dmitrij_livanov_i_vuzy_optimizaciya_vmesto_obrazovaniya/ (accessed June 15, 2018)

39 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, 2018 p. 355.

40 For a critical assessment of Rosobrnadozor’s academic experts, see K. Guba, et al., “Kak rabotaet Rosobrnadzor,” Troïtskii variant, July 3, 2018, p. 4. https://trv-science.ru/2018/07/03/kak-rabotaet-rosobrnadzor/ (accessed June 15, 2018) On Rosobrnadzor’s controversial and, at least partly politically motivated, cancelling of the accreditation of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (“Shaninka») and of the European University, see “Eto bor’ba ne za “Shaninku, a za peresmostr polnomochii Rosobrnadzora”, Vesti obsrazovaniya, June 29, 2018; https://vogazeta.ru/articles/2018/6/29/quality_of_education/3801-vshe_vstupilas_za_shaninku (accessed June 15, 2018) and “Pochemu attaka na Evropeiskii universitet v Peterburge—katastrofa dlya rossiiskoi nauki i obrazovaniya,” Meduza, Sept. 29, 2017. https://meduza.io/feature/2017/09/29/pochemu-ataka-na-evropeyskiy-universitet-v-peterburge-katastrofa-dlya-rossiyskoy-nauki-i-obrazovaniya (accessed June 15, 2018)

41 See, for example, M. Gladwell, “The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really Tell Us,” The New Yorker, Feb. 14 and 21, 2011.

42 A. Chernykh, “Pochemu vedushchie vuzy perevodyat na vneshnee upravlenie,” Kommersant, July 1, 2014, p. 5.

43 Zh. Toschchenko, “K chemu vedet neskonchaemaya optimizatisya obrazovaniya,” Nepavisimaya gazeta, Jan. 1, 2020. http://www.ng.ru/stsenarii/2020-01-27/9_7778_education.html? (consulted Jan 14, 2020)