Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 4 | Centers of Education in Russia: The Case for CASEs, page 4

“Russians are trying to define their post-Communist identity and to find organizing principles to construct their own world in the global society,” she had told the audience that day. Dressed in a black turtleneck, skirt and tall black boots, Zakovorotnaya looked like she could call the U.S. home. But her accent and her insights revealed a very Russian scholar. “The feelings ‘I can’ instead of ‘we can’ now dominate,” she had said, while also focusing on the need for a multidisciplinary approach to contemporary issues, which is an important criterion in selecting universities to develop a CASE.

Even all this time after that meeting in Washington, Zakovorotnaya was still aglow with the opportunity to have presented a paper. It gave her a certain competitive advantage among her colleagues, and although she spent most of our two days in Rostov handling logistics, it was clear that she had benefited from the travel opportunities offered by the CASEs program. Her husband owns the Ford automobile franchise in Rostov and the family has the financial ability to travel to Europe, but as a scholar, she wants to go to Novgorod or Voronezh, where other CASEs are exploring similar Russian power issues. In her conversation with me, her most passionate comments came when she talked about what Russia’s universities are losing. “The intellectual sphere still exists,” she said, “but it’s evaporating. I can’t imagine how we will progress if we don’t have our intellectual potential stimulated, if we lose the people who think. We can’t be robots,” she said, referring to the old Soviet system of education. But most of all, she seemed to worry about young intellectuals leaving Russia for greener pastures—for her, the CASEs represent a form of protection against what she termed “the Russian brain drain.”

Of the many young intellectuals I met with in Rostov, none epit-omized the intellectual potential Zakovorotnaya wanted so dearly for the CASEs to promote and protect as much as Herman Mineev. Just 24, he was tall, dark-haired and emotional. His English was out of practice but he wanted desperately to converse in the language. He was frustrated when he couldn’t find the right English words to discuss his many-layered ideas. But his eyes twinkled and his hands gesticulated with enthusiasm as he told me why he had given up his high-paying vice president’s job at a mobile phone company to become a full-time, $30-a-month professor of sociology.

“I earned big money for Rostov,” he told me. “If I wanted expensive jeans, I could buy them; if I wanted to go to an expensive nightclub, I could go to the nightclub. But I realized that it’s not those things that I need. To think and do research, that’s what excites me.”

Mineev’s field of study focuses on political science and history. But ethnic conflicts and how to prevent them—a field of scholarship the Corporation has supported for many years—is what seems to animate Herman most. “I want to find models that will prevent conflicts,” he said, “because that’s what worries me the most. Chechnya and Kosovo, for example: I want to know why some of these conflicts have bloody conclusions and others, like Quebec, achieve peaceful solutions.” As he spoke in his halting English, I wondered if living close to the Caucasus made this field of study so alive for him. He was not focused on something theoretical: Mineev saw his work as vital and urgent.

He traveled by bus across town to meet me for a second time, anxious to have further conversation with an English-speaker and to pour out his ideas and beliefs. He has worked since he was 15 and risen to the top at each job. I was convinced that this was the kind of young intellectual who would find and take advantage of any opportunities that came his way. And even in this far-off town, hours from Moscow and seemingly unconnected to the West, Mineev talked about himself as a young citizen of the world. “There are no longer borders,” he said. “Eventually, we will all be connected. The model of the Internet influences our minds and the way we live. We are one world.”

Despite his optimism, I couldn’t help but ask if he felt cut off from the rest of Russia—and the world—here in Rostov. Ending the isolation of scholars was one of the seminal ideas behind Vartan Gregorian’s decision to create a higher education program that could reinvigorate and reconnect Russian intellectuals to their national and international peers, and the notion had permeated the CASE design. “I don’t feel as connected as I would like,” Mineev told me. “I want to study in many other countries, including the U.S.” I had no doubt that in the near future, Mineev would find a way to use his connection to the CASE program to make his dream of academic mobility come true.

Meeting Mineev was, for me, one of the highlights of this journey through an ever-changing Russia. It wasn’t only his determination to speak English or his wonderful way of saying that material things didn’t satisfy his Russian soul. It was the fact that he was experimenting with his life, following one direction and then another and that he believed he could change, invent and then reinvent himself again and again that appealed to me. It was so American!

But as much as my journalistic spirit needed to hear these stories and meet the young professors and students who would give life to the work being carried out at the CASEs, I was aware that, as a foundation, we are spending millions of dollars not only to benefit the lives of individual intellectuals but to promote deep-seated change in Russia’s higher education system. Our ambitious hope is that the CASEs can serve as catalysts in bringing about transformation.

This is a goal shared by Andrei Kortunov, director of the CASEs program. “In the past, in Russia, we didn’t engage in innovative, Western-style scholarship, developing data, collecting facts and analyzing our results,” he explained to me in a lengthy interview one long night as we traveled from one regional CASE to another. “But it is what we hope to develop through the CASE initiative. CASEs,” he continued, “are built on the assumption that you need to invest heavily in faculty, especially younger faculty, which should have a profound impact on both their research capacity and their teaching ability, because if these young professors can think creatively enough to design and implement an innovative research project, that ability will affect how they teach their students.” Continuing, Kortunov said, “Political science didn’t exist in the Soviet Union. You had scientific Communism. Sociology was perceived as a bourgeois alternative to the Marxist analysis of social problems, so sociology as a field never developed. And statistics, which economists need to do serious work, were unavailable—statistics were state secrets. Many social science scholars had to adjust themselves to the situation under Soviet rule. They were not allowed to fulfill the traditional role of scholars working in the humanities—to raise questions about society.”

“Ending the Soviet style of education-by-rote will not be easy,” Kortunov continued. “We need to develop a research culture that is not afraid to be both controversial and provocative, which means that one must take risks. And if you are working in a conservative university—which regional institutions tend to be—the risks for a scholar can be high.” Outlining the challenges, Kortunov told me that one major problem is the fact that in Russian universities, there are layers of bureaucracy involved in the degree-granting process. Being innovative might antagonize older professors who have to approve a young scholar’s degree because still, today, many in the top ranks of Russian universities cling to the old Soviet way of doing things.

But change must come. Building the humanities and supporting research based on intellectual pursuit is the only way that Russian educational leaders see the country reconnecting with Europe and restoring its status as a world-class power. In the highest circles of the Kremlin, there has even been discussion about joining the “Bologna Process,” which would allow students in Europe and Russia to have equivalent degrees with credits that are valid in both European and Russian institutions. Currently, a Russian degree is not accepted in the West and Russian officials see this as a crippling problem in a globalized economy.

In the traditional Russian setting, the word “scholar” painted a picture of someone working for hours in a library, researching everything that had been written about a subject and then simply repackaging already accepted knowledge in a different way. Now, under Western pressure, and in the CASE framework, a scholar must be, in Kortunov’s words, “Ambitious, not about his or her own personal career, but in terms of the questions and problems he or she is approaching.” At the conclusion of our conversation, it was clear to me that for Kortunov, building a culture where intellectual honesty is appreciated, nurtured and disseminated, is critical to the very future of Russia, and to all its people.

Next page: “Eventually, we will all be connected. The model of the Internet influences our minds and the way we live. We are one world.” —Herman Mineev, CASE scholar

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