Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 1 | A Bright Future: Russian Higher Education, page 4 (low bandwidth)

In the outlying regions, money shortages have meant shortages of literature and textbooks. Freud may be de rigueur in Moscow, but a professor in Vladivostok complains that his students cannot obtain his books and in a test, one even identified the founder of psychoanalysis as “Fred.” Sergei Kulikov, a professor of modern history in Novosibirsk State University (NGU) says that he tries to overcome this obstacle by subscribing to over 100 publications with his own money and scouring the Internet for class materials.

A big part of the problem is at the top, says Alexander Tikhonov, another former Minister of Education who is now promoting Internet technology in education. He points to examples such as across-the-board stipends—even rich students with mobile phones get their 200 rubles a month—as a gross waste that costs the state $200 million per year.

Marketing the Best and Brightest, At Home and Abroad

Nikolai Dikansky, the rector of Novosibirsk State University, is well aware that he and his colleagues are going to have to make use of some overtly western marketing techniques to keep their institutions afloat. Dikansky, who says he has turned down several Western loans and grants because of the conditions they would impose, still sounds like a ruthless capitalist when he talks about his students. The university was founded in Akademgorodok in 1959 to produce researchers for the adjacent institutes of the Siberian Academy of Sciences. Akademgorodok was one of the birthplaces of reform, producing such Gorbachev-era strategists as economist Abel Aganbegyan and sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya.

But now, says Dikansky, “There is a huge demand in the West for our graduates, for programmers. But who pays us for this? They are our product. All of these foreign firms grab our graduates after we’ve educated them for free. So teachers end up teaching for free. Russian oil companies come to me,” he continues. “They say, we want your graduate. I say, pay money for him or we’ll send him to Seattle.” Referring to Microsoft, Dikansky says that there are at least 40 NGU alumni at the company and an equal number in Silicon Valley. The university has an alumni office that solicits funds, still a rarity in Russia and not always feasible because of tax legislation that offers few breaks.

Another financial strategy that Dikansky is mulling over centers on recruiting paying students from China, Pakistan and Turkey. He is opposed to the idea of charging tuition to Russian students.

Down the street, at the Boreskov Institute of Catalysis—where marble floors and shiny turnstiles in the foyer make the institute look more like a bank branch than part of the Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences—graduates of NGU are working on projects such as one venture with Solutia, which used to be part of the Monsanto Company. The institute patented a one-step process for turning benzene into phenol, less harmful to the environment than the traditional method. Solutia is building a plant in the United States that will use the technique.

Business students at Novosibirsk State Technical University help organize trade shows and promote technological and biomedical products developed at the university. Some are also studying Turkish, thanks to a corporate sponsor from Turkey. The department is using a World Bank loan of $500,000 to develop the teaching of economic theory with help from visiting professors from the University of Washington.

At the Belozersky Institute, affiliated with Moscow State University, Dr. Alexey Agranovsky, head of a team studying plant viruses, has held onto his young researchers with help from two consecutive grants of 150,000 DM from Germany’s Volkswagen AG and ruble support from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. Agranovsky moonlights as a blues singer and has given the name “rattlesnake” to one of his discoveries—the structure of a particular virus—in honor of Rattlesnake Annie, a favorite American country-blues singer with whom his band played in Moscow in the summer of 1997.

Marketing is also on the mind of Igor Fyodorov, rector of the venerable 170-year-old Moscow State Technical University (MGTU), which produced many of the founders of today’s space and nuclear science. He says that universities need to teach students how to market themselves. During the Soviet era, he explains, students were assigned jobs as required by the state. By upgrading its status from institute to university, which a lot of schools have done in recent years (though sometimes only as self-promotion), MGTU was able to broaden its offerings. Students are now spending more time on the humanities—about fifteen percent—and learning foreign languages. They may be trained as engineers, but they have learned to be flexible.

“Specialists need to know how to quickly shift from one direction of work to another” says Fyodorov in his imposing Stalin-era office, surrounded by huge bouquets of flowers from his 60th birthday celebration. “For this they need a much broader, humanitarian, general education than they received in the past.”

Like institutions in many other regions of the country that are seeking greater independence from the rest of Russia, Tomsk State University has adapted not just to Russia’s new realities, but to the needs of the regional economy. The international relations program is focused not on training future diplomats for the Russian foreign ministry, but on educating graduates to work in the regional government and develop international ties that will draw investment to the timber-rich region. Another unique program, in ecological management, is training young environmentalists who work with local officials to combat violations such as poaching.

Recognizing and adapting to these new market forces, along with the many other practical considerations imposed by living in a country with a new, global outlook, may finally be transforming the face of something that heretofore seemed immutable: the Russian intelligentsia. “I think our old understanding of the intelligentsia is fading away,” says Andrei Levandovsky, a history professor at Moscow State University who specializes in the study of the 19th century intelligentsia. Levandovsky is pleased with his students, who he says are much more lively and inquisitive than Soviet-era students. But he also points out that they are already a new breed.

“There is a difference between the intelligentsia and intellectuals,” he explains. “The intelligentsia is involved in solving eternal problems, it is tormented, and reflective. Intellectuals have a much more pragmatic approach. They go into politics, business, places where they can use their knowledge.”

He may be right, although the truth may be even more complicated.

Konstantin Kozlov, the son of a miner, a senior at Tomsk State University and leader of its environmental activists, states almost matter-of-factly that he is not an “intelligent,” but gives a speech worthy of a Dostoyevsky character about the role of the intelligentsia and what must be done in Russia. He is categorically opposed to the war in Chechnya, but voted for the country’s new president, Vladimir Putin, who is committed to continuing the war, because “there was no alternative.”

“This is a period of transition with an old intelligentsia that does not understand the new system and no new intelligentsia that can say how better to do things,” he says. “I know that we are capable of changing this situation for the better,” he continues. “In my opinion, the situation in Russia will be changed by those in my generation who are going from one system to another, through this great change, and didn’t become pessimists, those who are not saying that everything is falling apart, but who are doing something. The future is ours.”

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