Transforming research universities: national programmes, university strategies and routine practices
- Andrey Shcherbenok, Skolkovo Moscow School of Management
In countries undergoing state-driven transformation of their university systems, such as Russia, South Korea or China, the longterm success depends on the extent to which new formats and norms penetrate into the core processes of education and research.
South Korea and Hong Kong were successful in radically transforming the ways their universities work because they relied heavily on internationally mobile faculty and staff who received their PhDs in European and American universities and brought their ingrained practices with them.
However, countries that cannot rely on wholesale university import face the challenge of changing the ways their existing faculty and staff work, which is often quite different from the international academic standards to which these countries aspire.
In Russia, which will be a prime case study in this seminar, an attempt to foster international practices on the part of the government and (some) university leaders over the past decade has produced mixed results, as the drive to transform the nation’s universities has encountered multiple layers of resistance. This seminar will address the diverse outcomes of these encounters and analyse the factors that influence them.
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Andrey Shcherbenok (PhD, St. Petersburg State U; PhD, U of California, Berkeley) was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia U in 2006-09 and Newton international research fellow of the British Academy in 2009-11. Since 2012 he is a professor of practice at Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO where he has worked in educational programmes and strategy sessions for university leaders across Russia and authored a MOOC, Universities: Transformational Governance. Since 2016 he is also a founding director of the School of Advanced Studies to be opened at the University of Tyumen in 2017.