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Article Excerpt
IT IS WELL KNOWN THAT EDUCATION IS ONE OF THE MOST CONSERVATIVE social institutions, resisting change and innovation, protecting its traditions and autonomy to the greatest extent possible. On the other hand, education is also an important economic factor that has to respond to changing labor market needs and modernization challenges. Moreover, in many countries education is loaded with various political agendas; the state tries to use educational institutions to groom loyal and committed subjects, and the opposition regards the same institutions as sources of contrarian ideas and potential agents of political change. This peculiar combination of social, economic, and political dimensions of education calls for a multidisciplinary approach when one intends to study the transformation of national education systems as well as the evolution of specific educational institutions.
Three centuries of the Russian higher education are a graphic illustration of this complex interplay of economic, social, and political factors affecting the development trajectory of educational institutions. Russian universities have always confronted two basic challenges in dealing with the outside world: how to protect their autonomy from the state without losing state support and patronage and how to be socially relevant without exposing themselves to political risks that are too high and without losing professional standards. The challenges are not dissimilar from those in other countries, but the specific feature of Russia has always been an excessively strong state (deep system crises in the beginning and at the end of the twentieth century notwithstanding) and a profoundly weak society; this imbalance has deeply affected the whole system of higher education and is still one of the key factors influencing higher education institutions in the country.
Another important feature of Russia has been the relative weakness of market mechanisms in the national economy at large and in education in particular. Even before the Communist revolution of 1917, the country did not have a real national education market. Universities were few, and the geographical mobility of the population was low. The Soviet Union applied the planned economy principle to all levels of education--from kindergartens to postgraduate studies; today the country cannot yet claim to have overcome the Soviet legacy. Therefore, higher education institutions could never really rely on the private sector as a balance to the state; they had and still have to interact with appropriate state bureaucracies (mostly at the federal level) as the pivotal sources of funding, standards, and legitimacy. Even for private higher education institutions, which emerged in abundance after 1991 and which have never been dependent on public funding, relations with the state have been extremely important from the point of view of licensing, accreditation, and general oversight. This dependency has been considered by the majority of the Russian educational community to be a liability and all the history of the Russian higher education demonstrates continuous attempts of universities to achieve more autonomy from state bureaucrats.
In relations with the state the right for greater autonomy has included at least three dimensions. First, Russian universities, like many of their peers in Europe, have always tried to secure maximum institutional autonomy (elections of rectors and deans, fights for protective university charters, attempts to receive financial flexibility, and independent university property management). Second, universities have insisted on their intellectual autonomy (tolerating dissenting students and faculty, traditional support for opposition political groups, defending universities as sanctuaries of liberal ideas). Finally, the university community has been attempting to gain as much professional autonomy as possible (a more active role in curricula development, rivalry with the academy of sciences for leadership in research, attempts to introduce local courses). One should not, however, oversimplify this fight, labeling universities as "good guys" defending themselves from the "bad guys" in the government: the history of Russian education is full of examples when universities appeared to be self-serving and self-gratifying, ignoring broader public interests and lacking vision.
To a large degree, Russian higher education was based on the German model of Humboldt University and inherited many general features of continental Europe, including the love-hate relations with the state. The continental European tradition is distinctly different for the Anglo-Saxon one and this is something that often becomes a complication in American-Russian university partnerships. Universities in Russia emerged long before democratic institutions and civil society started to take roots in the country, unlike universities in the United States. Therefore, universities have been loaded with additional functions and have been perceived by the public as potential political and social actors and catalysts of political change and social transformation.
The relations between the state and universities have never been smooth and easy; from at least the early nineteenth century we can trace mutual suspicion, mistrust, and even outright conflict. The state needed universities, above all, as the main producer of professional cadre for the state machinery itself; however, the state was concerned about the political loyalties and social allegiances of university graduates. Nothing like a land grant college program could have emerged in Russia. On the contrary, the czarist regime had always tried to limit the number of universities to the absolute minimum to serve the needs of the public service. The Soviet regime did invest considerably in the massification of higher education, but it always preferred to support specialized technical schools rather than classical universities. The latter were regarded by the Communist regime as a fertile soil for contrarian ideas and political dissent.
On the other hand, universities (with the exception of the currently emerging private sector in higher education) have always looked at the state as the ultimate funder, supporter, client, and source of legitimacy. They were looking for more autonomy from the state, but they were always fighting for budgets, recognition, guidance, and protection. At this moment, for the first time in the history of Russian higher education we see a moderate trend toward gradual emancipation of state (public) higher education institutions from the government. It is not clear, however, whether this trend is irreversible or not. One should mention that since universities were founded and financed by the state, they inherited a lot of particular features of "standard" state bureaucracies: hierarchy, lack of transparency, high degree of corruption, red...
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