While the Idea of Developing Science at Universities Is a Sound One, State Officials’ Way of Implementing It Is Inherently Flawed
The government has recently approved a resolution to establish national research universities. If everything goes according to plan, the tender will be held soon, and the five-year-long financing will begin in the fall. But this important (if not key) project was caught in a bureaucratic trap from the start.
To cut a long story short, the main problem of the Russian education and the Russian system of scientific knowledge is that the universities’ are divorced from science. Beside some rare exceptions (the National Nuclear Research University MIFI, the Russian Economic School, the Higher School of Economics, some departments of the Moscow State and St. Petersburg State Universities…the list goes on, but not for long), scientific personnel are being trained in one place, while the actual science is being done in another. During the 1990s the number of higher learning institutions that conduct some kind of independent research fell from 453 to 387. This number later grew a bit, but it is yet to come back even to the Soviet level (which in and of itself is not a benchmark). In 2004 to 2006 income from scientific projects made up just 3.7 percent of the institutions’ revenues. Today, the overall scientific research expenditures of Russian universities amount to $1.1 billion. For comparison, in Turkey this figure is 2.5 billion.
Beginning in the 2000s the Ministry of Science and Education has been conducting a war with the monopoly of the Academy of Sciences and its smaller clones, the Agricultural and Medical Academies. It looks as though the goal is quite reasonable—to shift the center of the burdensome research gravity from the academies to the universities. In Europe, the United States and even parts of Asia the most strenuous scientific work that brings a profit and attracts qualified personnel is done at the higher education institutions. Even in places where there is an equivalent to our academy (the National Center of Scientific Research in France, the Max Plank and the Leibnitz societies in Germany, where the Academy of Sciences of the GDR was dismissed), the university labs are in the lead. But first of all, it would make much more sense to try to boost the sciences at the universities rather than belittle the status and the ambitions of the academy— market competition would decide which one is our future. Secondly, this battle, which took up a few important years of political and economic stability, has had no results (not counting the re-distribution of the academy’s lands and property). It’s just that the academic bureaucracy has become more dependent on the authorities, and the scientific community is taking fewer liberties. But university science has failed to establish itself as an equally important phenomenon and a strong competitor to the academy.
And here we get what seems like a reasonable move—the establishment of national research universities. This move has long been awaited and even comes a bit too late: too much time was wasted on establishing the norms. Now you can show the results of your scientific practices to the competition commission, secure financing, create laboratories and scientific departments at academic institutions, blend the old with the new, create a symbiosis, strive for the “center of superiority” status that the leading Western institutions possess and make money fulfilling orders. And then, perhaps, a self-governing scientific environment will appear at universities, and things will move forward…
But if you read the resolution thoroughly, breaking through the language of a government document, a very interesting detail will emerge. It’s not about how much money will be given out in one grant (they say it will be 200 million rubles—ask serious people if this is enough). And it’s not even the fact that the first year of the project’s implementation has already been missed. The thing is that these grants cannot be spent on science itself. The procedure of applying for grants has been outlined carefully, as well as the respectable grounds for rejection. The makeup of the expert committees has been announced. But paragraph 21 lists the expenses that can be covered with the grant money, and science is not on this list. You can purchase laboratory and scientific equipment, train your personnel, develop your informational resources, fine tune the system of managing the teaching process and even, if you really want, develop the learning curriculum. But if you want to do science itself, this is not a question for us. For whom is it? There is no answer. Give us your taxpayer identification number, and you’ll get an innovation.
We keep on talking about innovational development. The “curse if natural resources” is now an expression. “Falling behind” reverberates through society. The communists, members of United Russia and the rare liberals all speak of a knowledge-based economy. The audience listens with inevitable skepticism, since it is already convinced that a whip cannot stand up to an axe. Although the renewed civilization does not presuppose a whip or an axe.
Sadly, this situation is like the joke about the wise rabbi: and you’re also right, woman. The project masterminds are right, the universities’ deans are right, the scientists are right and the politicians are right. The skeptics are also right. It’s just that our ruling elites function is some very strange way—just like their Western colleagues they understand perfectly well that the country and the world are in for some serious trouble in the near future. And we will end up either with breakthrough technology, alternative energy resources, the free circulation of ideas and a more complex society, or with a fiasco and possibly a collapse. But they are only able to cruelly and systematically resolve momentary issues. Did today’s Russia need a “tax haven” and a flat rate of minimal taxes for physical persons? It did. The goal has been set and achieved. But the managing elite does not understand why we would need a transformed system of scientific knowledge right here, right now, and what power issues are connected with this transformation.
No, there is no question as to why this is needed in the future, but why would we need it today? The effect (or lack thereof) will not be felt anytime soon—the bosses of other sessions will have to deal with it. That is why, like the Western pragmatics, our directors give the “go ahead” to reforming the scientific sphere. And, like their Eastern colleagues, they indifferently watch this sphere get bogged down in a self-sufficient bureaucracy.
