Higher education in Russia Part II: Since the war began
- Igor Chirikov, Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley
- Anna Smolentseva, PhD student, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK (discussant)
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The devastating effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are visible to all. As the CGHE webinar of 19 May showed, tertiary and high education too have been fundamentally disrupted and in places eliminated. Many students and academic faculty have left the country or been drawn into the war effort and buildings and infrastructure destroyed. The future of local tertiary education in Russian occupied zones is bleak. What is less visible is that the war has been accompanied by a savage repression of anti-war protest in Russia, catching many students and faculty in its net, and a moral crisis for institutions. The rectors of state universities all signed a statement of support for Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, reminding the world that university leaders are appointed by the state and institutional autonomy is highly constrained when the interests of the regime are at stake. The state has jettisoned Russian participation in the Bologna alignment of structures and courses in Europe and appears to have dropped the internationally benchmarked ‘five in 100’ excellent programme designed to lift Russian universities up the global rankings. International links now seem to be actively discouraged, a return to the Soviet era closure, and large numbers of academic faculty and students have left the country. For faculty and students who remain in Russia, many of them deeply opposed to the policy of the country and grieved by the shutting down of free intellectual life in the universities, the future looks bleak. Our two experts who lead the webinar are in touch with the internal situation in Russia but unlike their colleagues inside, free to speak the truth.
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Igor Chirikov is a Senior Researcher and SERU Consortium Director at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley. His research involves student experience and learning outcomes, the use of technology in universities and international comparative higher education.
Anna received the Candidate Degree (doctoral degree equivalent) from Moscow State University in 1998 and has worked at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow where she founded the International Summer School on Higher Education Research in 2013. She has been a US National Academy of Education/Spencer postdoctoral fellow and recipient of a Fulbright New Century Scholarship, and a Salzburg Global Seminar faculty. Her research focuses on the changing role of higher education in society, Russian higher education, and transformations in post-Soviet societies and higher education systems. With Brendan Cantwell and Simon Marginson she co-edited High Participation Systems of Higher Education (Oxford University Press, 2018) and with Jeroen Huisman and Isak Froumin, 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries (Palgrave, 2018). Forthcoming is Assessing the Contributions of Higher Education, edited with Daria Platonova, Brendan Cantwell and Simon Marginson, now in production at Edward Elgar. Anna is currently working on a PhD thesis in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge, on the transformation of the moral order of society in Russia from Soviet times to the present.
