#6
The Chronicle of Higher Education
December 14, 2001
For Russia's Universities, a Decade of More Freedom and Less Money
Facilities languish and top scholars leave, but students have unprecedented options
By BRYON MacWILLIAMS
Moscow

It used to be that scholars here could be set for life. One's education defined who he or she was in society. The Communist Party once provided scientists and other academics with better salaries, better apartments, and, at times, the ability to engage in scholarship for the sake of scholarship. To this day one of the first questions Russians ask of strangers is, "Who are you by education?" Only now a professor might sell beer -- or books from his personal library -- from a folding table on the street.

The abject state of scholars is emblematic of the degradation of higher education here in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union 10 years ago this month. A diploma and a job in academe mean less than they once did, in a country proud of its achievements in physics, mathematics, technology, and space. A rich legacy of research has withered.

"There are pockets of excellence," says Jan Sadlak, director of the UNESCO European Center for Higher Education, in reviewing the current state of Russian higher education. "There is a great core of mediocrity, and quite a large number of very dubious initiatives thriving on the very high social demand for education ... because people in Russia are fairly eager to learn.

"One thing that is very, very clear... is that the financial situation, which means public state support for higher education, is lacking."

The severe decline has been noted, however, and some attempt at reversing it has begun. The country's 2002 draft budget allocates more resources for education than for the military, a first in the nation's history.

Along with the drop in financing, many other changes have swept through Russian universities in the last decade. Curriculums have been purged of their former ideological mandate: Universities no longer offer courses in Marxism-Leninism or Scientific Communism. The humanities, a weakness of the Soviet system, have progressed rapidly. The sciences have remained exceptionally strong. International exchange and cooperation has flourished. The wildfire spread of private universities has given public universities healthy competition and given students new institutions that are flexible because they are largely free from regulation. This, in turn, has fostered more freedom of choice in state institutions.

More Students

College students are responding to those changes. The total number of college students increased by 16.4 percent over the past year, while enrollment in technical colleges rose by about 10 percent, according to the newspaper Ekonomika i Zhizn.

But today many of the best young professors leave academe for more lucrative employment -- often in foreign countries. Students select majors with an eye toward marketing their education abroad. Admissions standards are tilted in favor of the wealthy, not the scholarly. Good students from rural areas are cut off from the good universities. The infrastructure at campuses is crumbling. The volumes in libraries get staler by the day and are not replenished. Outdated textbooks and laboratory equipment are not being replaced. Fake diplomas are being sold on city streets. A cottage industry of preparatory courses is leading to the outright purchase of grades. Professors, perhaps the lowest-paid professionals in society, are becoming criminals through their widespread acceptance of students' bribes, to ensure good grades and acceptance into the department of their choice.

Educators openly acknowledge these realities. Still, many insist that a college education in Russia is on a par with that in the West -- only less expensive. Brainpower, they note, exists independent of material surroundings. Says Yaroslav Kuzminov, rector of the State University Higher School of Economics and an influential voice in the public dialogue on education: "You don't need to tear down our schools. You need to reinvigorate them, provide them with resources, and, to the greatest extent possible, develop them."

"Even though many problems have accumulated on every level of education, we are not prepared to give up the system of education that we have had," Vladimir Filippov, the minister of education, told The Chronicle. "We definitely had one of the best systems of education in the world in the '50s and '60s. But to restore it to when it was the best in the world, today, is not the way to go. Now it already has been shown that the former system of education does not answer a lot of the demands of society. Not only that, but efforts to return to the old system are not realistic because throughout the whole world, in Europe, everyone is headed toward a system of so-called mass education."

He adds, "The principle must be education throughout one's entire life."

An Evolving System

In the realm of continuing education, more than any other, perhaps, higher education has retained its indispensable role in Russian society. Community colleges do not exist here. Associate degrees do not have an equivalent. But a vigorous system of evening classes, weekend seminars, and specialized training has evolved quickly, particularly in cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.

"There is now an army of people who first got their degrees in the late '80s and early '90s. We started our studies under the Soviet Union, but graduated in a market economy. We had not known then what [fields] would be needed later. Today most of the people who take evening classes and pursue second degrees are doing so to be competitive, and to earn more money," says Vladislav Mazur, a lawyer in the Moscow office of an international auditing and tax firm.

Such examples of scholarship being parlayed into free-market success are often cited by President Vladimir Putin as priorities, and a source of prestige for the country. "Yet I must honestly say that the government has paid insufficient attention to education in the recent past," he acknowledged in September, in a speech at Moscow State Pedagogical University.

In the 1990s, spending on education, which hovered at around 3 percent of the gross national product, was among the lowest in the Commonwealth of Independent States, a union of former Soviet republics. "It is some kind of savagery," says Mr. Kuzminov. "For the fourth straight year Russia is experiencing economic growth, but we are still 8 billion rubles in the red to the system of education. It is a disgrace that cannot be seen anywhere else in the world." As with many other sectors, the government has not always paid what it has promised in the budget.

The State Council, an advisory body comprised largely of the governors of Russia's 89 regions, has called for the allocation of 400 billion rubles immediately, and 200 billion rubles annually through 2010, to modernize curriculums and refurbish the deteriorating infrastructure on campuses and in schools throughout the country.

It appears that Mr. Putin has listened. The federal budget proposed for 2002 allocates some 78 billion rubles ($2.7-billion) primarily for higher and continuing education, an increase of 39 percent over 2001 spending levels and 59 percent over 2000 figures, according to records of the Ministry of Education and the Education Committee of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.

When the federal allocation is combined with the 35 billion rubles slated to be supplied by municipal governments, which are primarily responsible for financing schools, the total is in excess of projected military expenditures for 2002. The measures would double the salaries for professors and administrators. Salaries for professors and instructors in Primorsky Krai, in the far southeast, are about 1,500 rubles ($31) per month, whereas a professor in Khakassia, in eastern Siberia, earns about 1,830 rubles ($63). Viktor Sadovnichy, rector of Moscow State University, by far the most prestigious institution in the country, reports an official monthly salary of 2,791 rubles and 40 kopeks. "If I did not receive an academic stipend, I probably could not live. Grants help somewhat," he says, speaking of extra money he receives for sitting on various councils and committees.

Because of low faculty salaries, only 50 percent of students from departments capable of generating academics or schoolteachers move into teaching positions upon graduation, according to the Education Ministry.

'Catastrophic' Conditions

The increases in spending, however, have garnered only the subdued endorsement of educators. Some characterize the measures as fleeting, and cosmetic. For example, the capital outlay sets aside 1 billion rubles ($34-million) for laboratory equipment -- the condition of which has been called "catastrophic" by the Education Ministry. The budget also allocates only 400 million rubles for book purchases, or about 100,000 rubles ($3,300) per university library.

"The main reason for the brain drain from Russia is not low salaries, but the absence of necessary [laboratory] equipment. The contemporary scientific process is constructed so that discoveries may be announced in scientific journals only if you have worked on modern, certified instruments," says Mr. Sadovnichy of Moscow State.

The new spending also does little to improve stipends for students. If a student this year received 100 rubles ($3.33) per month, next year he or she would receive between 400 and 500 rubles ($16.60). A sum of $17 is sufficient to cover the cost of dormitory housing, but not public transport, let alone food.

The populace, however, now accepts that a free education is no longer guaranteed. About 1.5 million, or 33 percent of the estimated 4.5 million students, pay for a portion of their education, whereas in 1995 only 200,000 of the estimated 2.5 million students paid, the RIA Novosti news agency reports.

Tutors and Bribes

These figures refer only to official tuition costs. Parents have become accustomed to a vast system of private tutors -- more often than not professors -- who provide lessons to help students gain admission into the institution of their choice. The lessons, in reality, are bribes to ensure high marks on rigorous entrance exams and a student's ultimate acceptance by an institution's admissions board.

"In regard to corruption, I want to say that there is no country in the world where you find corruption all over the place but not in education. That never happens, never," Mr. Filippov says. "If the laws are such in a country that they allow ... corruption, then they allow corruption in education, too."

Mr. Filippov's staff last year teamed up with the General Prosecutor's Office to install a telephone hotline for reporting such abuses. Bribery offenses may carry prison terms under Russian law. Still, its backers say the project failed -- despite a nationwide promotion -- because of a general reluctance to name names.

Arrests of professors are almost unheard of in Russia. In August a court in the Novosibirsk Oblast, in Siberia, sentenced a professor from a technical college to four years in prison for altering grades for money. Lenta.ru, an Internet-based news agency, suggested that the professor was not reported merely for bribery, but because she demanded too much money.

The Education Ministry is experimenting with a plan to curtail bribery and corruption through a series of five unified state exams, similar in format to the SAT in the United States. If adopted nationwide in 2004, as expected, students would not need to travel to the institution of their choice just to take an entrance exam. Instead, they would take one test, and the scores would be sent to up to 10 different institutions -- therefore eliminating subjectivity and, at the same time, reducing the avenues for bribery.

Another consequence of the subjective admissions policies is evident in the demographics. In 1991 some 30 percent of students enrolled in Moscow universities were from the city or its suburbs; the figure is now 70 percent. "The strongest universities were built for all of Russia, not just Moscow and the Moscow suburbs," Mr. Filippov says. The president's vision of a "managed democracy" headed by a strong central government -- regarded by liberals as a euphemism for authoritarian rule -- has led to a resurgence in academe of a government obsession with internal security threats from abroad. The Federal Security Service, or FSB, is widely suspected of being behind the drafting of an austere system of oversight for the Russian Academy of Sciences that is being likened to a drawing down of the former Iron Curtain. The directive, which the government attempted to keep secret, mandates the monitoring of contact with foreigners by the academy's 53,000 scientists as well as the potential restriction of access to the Internet.

Threatened Freedoms

The anticipated clampdown on academic freedom prompted George Soros, the American businessman, to reconsider his philanthropic activities and investments in Russia. Mr. Soros' Open Society Institute has done more toward bringing universities online than the combined undertakings of the government programs "Electronic Russia" and "Common Educational Environment."

Academic freedom is also said to be at risk because of the government program "Russian Language," which aims to increase proficiency in Russian and exert the language in regions where a local dialect is spoken. Last spring nearly the entire staff of the department of Komi folklore and Finno-Ugric literature at the state university in Syktyvkar, about 625 miles northeast of Moscow, was fired after protesting the introduction of a new policy mandating that subjects be taught in Russian, not Komi.

As far as freedom to criticize goes, theoretically and, in most cases, practically, it exists. The FSB has given some visiting academics, including Jack Tobin, a Fulbright scholar, a hard time and the Putin administration indicated its displeasure at a textbook that mocked those former communist bureaucrats who only halfheartedly embrace democracy.

But books and teaching materials are influenced less by the lack of freedom of speech than pure economics. In most instances, the government must approve teaching materials for state institutions. But the institutions don't have the money for new textbooks anyway. They don't have computers so the professor can go online and get independent materials or correspond by e-mail. And the libraries no longer can afford subscriptions to foreign and domestic periodicals, or purchase new books, so the professors are frozen out there, too. Money limits professors more than censorship.

In at least one region, Chechnya, higher education has been effectively eviscerated by two wars in the past decade. Earlier this year, one FSB agent was killed and another was seriously wounded as they left Grozny State University. A car driven by the university's rector was later hijacked, apparently in retaliation, as it left the campus. Elsewhere, two medical students were critically injured -- one lost both legs -- in June during an explosion near a military checkpoint in the capital, Grozny.

The Russian government is not ready for educational reform, in Chechnya or anywhere else. The word "reform" was even shunned in September during a gathering of the State Council as it undertook to evaluate the health of the national system of education. Some more critical observers hint that the discussion to begin rehabilitation is premature when a system is in the advanced stages of gangrene.

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