Conclusion: what reform for the (Russian) university?

To conclude, I would like to go back to my first statement. It is too simple to seek to describe a global political and economic situation through a model such as ‘neoliberal reform’ or ‘cognitive capitalism and immaterial labor’. These trends exist globally, but they are constantly confronting different forces and often produce contradictory effects. In Russia, the emergence of the service economy in the 1990s coincided wit h the destruction of industry, the impoverishment of most of the population and a general increase of anarchy and anomy in society. In the 2000s, growth in several key sectors of the economy brought wealth to the state and allowed it to raise living standards. Nevertheless, this reconstruction was partial and unilateral. Neoliberal policies in the tax system and general management coexisted with monopoly, corporatism and corruption that seeped through all the economy as well as with inertia in the social sectors.

In the educational sphere, neoliberal and managerial measures such as the strict formalization of management, the introduction of standardized admission examinations for universities and the investment in the technological base of education are supposed to accomplish a reform in the system, yet through reinforcing the power of the administration without looking into the content or framework of education and without attracting new strong faculty, they actually reproduce the status quo. The service economy does not demand high-quality education; its demand for social sciences and humanities actually contributes to stagger them and continues to isolate the Russian university from the rest of the world.

Like in other sectors of Russian state and economy, we see a deadlock. Located at the frontier between the core and the periphery, Russia embodies the internal tension of the system. Thus, the elites were originally set on the emulation of Western liberal democracy, but it turned out that democracy can only be imposed by the nondemocratic methods. An authoritarian regime resulted, which tries to lead neoliberal reforms, but it stops short of the democratic elements of these reforms (free elections and independent courts). Moreover, the democratic legitimation (‘sovereign democracy’) is the only one that protects the regime from the globalist ambitions of the U.S. and EU, but a real implementation of electoral democracy would expose the Russian politics precisely to these ambitions. The result is a strange overdetermined symbiosis of neoliberal managerialism and of a huge conservative bureaucracy reminiscent of the late Soviet times.

The same deadlock is at work in the sphere of public services and of higher education in particular. Russian population has traditionally been highly educated, and the Russian economy, with a few competitive industries, huge concentration of capital and millions of immigrants ready to do the manual labor, has a clear post-fordist, ‘cognitive’ face. Entrance of Russia to the global core requires technological innovation. At the same time, the neoliberal logic that is dominant at the ‘core’ pushes to privatize or marketize education and makes it impossible for the elites to seriously take up values and ideologies other than technocratic achievement. However, an opening to the Western standards of education would automatically mean a political influence, a cultural transformation and a need to fire most of the incompetent faculty in social sciences and humanities. The former would undermine the hegemony of the ruling elites, and the latter would lead to a social explosion. And even then, there is no chance of really winning an intellectual competition against the Anglo-Saxon academic hegemony. The answer is then obvious – not to change anything in the mass system of education, and to try to build up a small, highly educated elite in a few privileged institutions (such as the Higher School of Economics and the Russian Academy of State Service, in Moscow). Such response, objectively understandable as it is, coincides with the global neoliberal trend of deliberately reinforcing the economic and cultural inequality and playing down the results of the 200-year epoch of public Enlightenment.

But here we get to a broader problem of whether such elitist education could succeed within a general culture of mediocrity and entertainment: such approach is doomed to a reproduction of intellectual class, because the general culture would not be conducive to the choice of an intellectual career. Higher education under its modern model implies a moment of a student’s subjectivation, in opposition to the teacher: an elitist university makes such personal knowledge almost impossible, thus turning students into conformist uncritical experts. (The case of the European University at Saint-Petersburg, with its unwilling, half-minded revolt, points at the tendency that would become even more extreme.) On the other hand, the intellectual authority of a teacher in such a school would also be problematic, because of the emphasis on discipline, citation ratings, publication requirements and the pressure for practical knowledge. Meanwhile, mass education, meant to be neglected, would increasingly produce protests by the underpaid faculty and undertaught students. Because students do not only tend to revolt against an authority, but often revolt, hysterically, because they lack a master, and the education is precisely a field where they are supposed to get one. Hence, Lacan’s famous saying that the students at the barricades of 1968 ‘wanted a master’: it was less a critique and more an objective constatation of what a modern revolt, in a democratic society, is about.

Now, what can be an alternative to this neoliberal stagnation? In such a context, the only solution for the state (considering for a moment that bureaucrats are well-intentioned) would be to create new international institutions and to invite professional scholars and ‘organic’ intellectuals (critical individuals who are embedded in practice) of an international, or at least national, public reputation who can raise questions of general interest to society and to rethink certain types of social and material practices. We would have to give them funding and the freedom to manage these ‘teams’ that could welcome and fund scholars from abroad or edit bilingual journals.

Even if the opening of universities to the logics of the market may be harmful to the production of knowledge, some opening toward the society is necessary. A return toward ivory towers of the late Soviet and continental European type would be a mistake. The integration of universities with other social institutions can only take place through a temporary exchange of personnel between universities (professors should be sent to industries and firms), and these institutions (where ‘organic’ intellectuals should be forced to spend at least one semester in a university to systematize their thinking and exchange ideas with intellectual professionals). The media should, of course, be part of this system. Furthermore, large industries and corporations should develop small ‘universities’ of their own – as many large corporations in the West have done, although they are too focused on applied research to consider public discussion.

Thus, this is a call for the abandonment of isolating narcissism and of a commercial approach to education. Anarchic ‘democratism’ or the auto-education of students (echoing the ‘spirit of 1968’) is no longer an option, even if a certain democratization of the mode of operation of universities is absolutely necessary. The main task of the reform is to fight anomy and to rebuild the spirit of free thought and of collective work. This is only possible if we combine autonomy with the public opening of universities. Russia, like some other semi-periphery countries, is a global sociopolitical laboratory where global trends appear at their most extreme, and at the same time in an open contradiction among themselves.

Notes

I thank Ana Villareal for translating the first version of this article from French, and the International Sociological Association, for having posted it on its website.

1. Loic Wacquant (Chapter 5) points to the homology of processes in Brazil and US, but he nevertheless remarks that in the U.S., neoliberal violence is contained by the embedded consensual social structures, while in the more conflictual and dynamic society of Brazil, the tendency takes an extreme turn.

2. Important analysis of Russian politics from a left critical point of view are available from Boris Kagarlitsky (2002) and other more recent works by this author.

3. A short (30 lines) address of Medvedev to Russian policemen on their professional holiday (October 11, 2010), mentions ‘efficiency’ twice, ‘professionalism’ once, and ‘quality service’, once. Available at: (http://президент.рф/%D0%B2%D1%8B%D1%81%D1%82%D1%83%D0%BF%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F/9469, accessed March 13, 2011).

4. Jesse Souza rightly notes in this volume that corruption is no more a fact than it is ideology, which maintains a subaltern status of a country in the global world. Russia ranks 154 out of 178 countries. Corruption is valued at $300 billion, although Transparency International self-admittedly studies perceptions of corruption (by interviewing experts and local businessmen): available at (http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results). However, there is no doubt about the qualitative difference of the corruption climate in Russia and in the countries of the core: there is wide informal knowledge of prices of public offices, of channels, of fortunes of officials, as well as personal experience, which rarely lead to investigation: cases against corruption are aimed exclusively at state officials of secondary rank. In Europe and the U.S., while corruption certainly exists, it does not enjoy such a degree of toleration as in Russia, where it coexists, it is true with the myth of corruption’s ubiquity. For a good overview of literature on, and facts of, corruption in Russia, see Serguei Cheloukhine and Joseph King (2007), although they explain corruption by Soviet heritage and largely ignore its essential connection to capitalism.

5. From the fact that the Russian state supports this state sector, some made a wrong conclusion that the neoliberal policies of the 1990s had been reverted. Thus, Kim Scheppele writes: ‘Vladimir Putin and now his successor Dmitri Medvedev in Russia have both definitively rejected neoliberalism, and Russia paid all of its international debt as quickly as it could precisely to be able to construct a domestic social policy built on welfare liberalism’ (2010, p. 58). It is strange to call Russia a ‘welfare state’ if the average monthly pension in this oil and gas exporter roughly equals the living wage, salary tax is flat, profits from natural resources are in large part invested into foreign economies, and the Gini coefficient is 41; 52nd out of 136 countries (http://www.indexmundi.com/russia/distribution_of_family_income_gini_index.html).

6. In 2009, the average salary of educators was about 15,000 roubles or $500. In 2000, it was 1240 roubles or $60. Available at: (http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/population/trud/zp00-09.doc).

As Yaroslav Kuzminov (2001), rector of the Higher School of Economics, calculated, the salary in education has systematically been 30 percent lower than the average. The State Statistical Committee reports that in education, 60 percent of salaries ranged from 4200 roubles (150$) to 12,200 roubles (400$) per month.

7. $25 in 2000, $100 in 2005, $200 in 2009. Available at: (http://www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b10_13/IssWWW.exe/Stg/d1/06-15.htm).

8. On the competitive aspect, see a detailed, but somewhat apologetic, account by McKelvey and Holmen (2009).

9. Cf. D. Konstantinovsky (2010): ‘An education after the university, to acquire a new specialty, has almost become a rule. Universities become into something like a senior stage of high school. Only after graduating from a university, a young man or woman goes to obtain a profession that is in demand at the labor market’.

10. Cf. J. Souza (Chapter 4): The same distinctions that separate higher from lower classes in any society also inform global relations between societies and classes. This is especially true for science – the legitimizing institution for all practices in the modern world – where theorists of the center are supposed to be those who have the brains, while the theorists of the periphery are those who have the eyes. Science reproduces the relation of those countries that dispose of technology and those that export raw materials. In both cases, the center does the sophisticated work. The result is a global blindness. Concepts developed in the center remain just as regional, namely North Atlantic, as those developed in the periphery, which are mostly reactive (cf. Alexei Penzin’s (2008) description of the ‘subaltern’ position of Russian scholars).

11. Cf. Andrey Mikhel (2007, p. 161): ‘Universities [like other institutions] are now subjected to bureaucratization. In the Saratov State University, since 2003, there drastically grew the number of staff members having nothing to do with research or teaching.… Most of them were getting good salaries, often higher than the one of a full professor. Teaching and research activities were now buried under a sea of paperwork.… The university faculty, after the positive changes of the 1990s, was set on defending the democratic achievements’.

12. See, for instance, Maria Yudkevich (2004): ‘Publikuy ili proigraesh’. Voprosy obrazovania. See also the aforementioned Mikhail Sokolov (2009): ‘Chtoby indexy zitirovania srabotali’. Polit.ru, posted on October 12, 2009, visit March 13, 2011. Sokolov, after listing pluses and minuses of citation indexes, proposes an ideally liberal condition under which they work: full financial autonomy of journals and free market competition of citations among them.

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Date: 2015-12-24; view: 934