Students are not deterred by this. In the autumn, a banner that said “No to political dismissals!” was hung in one of the HSE buildings, and a similar action was held at the Moscow State Pedagogical University, about the non-payment of scholarships, plus another one in the St Petersburg State Agrarian University.
I think students are less afraid now. My friend participated in one of these actions and said: “Well, they will be expelled – so what?” With the decline in the quality of education in Russia, students are worrying about their status less and less. It is difficult to make any generalisations, I just want to say that there are some students who are fearless.
What about studying itself? Do young people generally still want to go to university?
Viktor: In Russia, a new sense of “student life” is being formed right now, including through our magazine. Before DOXA, there was another student outlet, produced by the team who run Bumaga [a city-wide publication about life in St. Petersburg] That paper closed down in 2012 with the wording: “In Russia, unfortunately, there are only people who study at universities, but there are no students.”
In recent years, it has become evident that Russian students are evolving, that people are aware of themselves as students and behave as students. They understand that they do not just go to university, but they also represent a certain social group. Academia has become more prestigious, a little less boring, a little more fashionable.
Education is also ridding itself of the Soviet gender gap – where boys studied technical subjects, and girls were in the humanities. In my humanities department, there were only four male students who graduated in the past 15 years. But in the last three years, there were five male students each year. They are not ashamed of studying art history, just as girls are not ashamed to study mathematics. Education is being democratised.
If you look at the interests of the DOXA team, then you have the two cultures of science and the arts all mixed up – the philosophy of technology, sociology and big data. Do you need to be in both camps to survive in the modern world?
Katya: In December, I carried out an investigation with my colleagues from DOXA about women in Russian academia: an attempt to collate a large body of data. According to the data we found, there is still an unequal proportion of women and men in the humanities and technical subjects. We found that women do not reach higher positions in academia at the doctoral level.
This subject is rarely discussed. When you study for a bachelor’s degree, you have a sense that there are more women than men – and this is in fact the case. And then, because of reproductive responsibilities and a conservative culture, a woman just does not have the time or is otherwise unable to go further. PhDs, teaching positions, professorships – all these are not easily accessible for women.
Natalya: There is political pressure through threats of expulsions, and there is the shadowy menace of harassment hanging over female students. There are fewer and fewer women as you go up the academic ladder – and this is attributable, among other things, to harassment. Women gradually become less motivated to pursue an academic career. This is happening against the background of the modern conservative turn in Russia, coupled with the bureaucratisation of the university, which increases the overall level of pressure on students and junior teachers.
Katya: Russian universities often do not support women. They do not investigate harassment. They do not provide any benefits when women go on maternity leave. If a female teacher at HSE goes on maternity leave, there starts a preferential publication period, when she does not need to comply with the annual quota on research publications. But Russian academia is arranged such that, prior to pregnancy, a woman has to prepare a reserve body of work. The grace period lasts only a year, while your childcare responsibilities last much longer.
Without publications you remain without additional payments, and this represents quite a large sum. If you sense that there will be no support at all, not even institutional support, you will lose heart, everything seems to be set against you.
Globally, we are seeing higher education require teachers to give more psychological and emotional support to students, increasing commercialisation and greater responsibility placed on teachers for the quality of their students’ work. Are these trends present in Russia? Or are Russian universities, like some other parts of society, isolated from the rest of the world?
Armen: The problem of isolation should be considered comprehensively. There is isolation, but it is connected with the fact that Russian universities are much poorer than many of the world’s successful top-ranking universities. There are not many universities in Russia that can, in principle, cooperate at an international level and adopt international practices.
There is definitely a trend of increasing commercialisation. In Russian universities, the number of people who pay for their education is increasing, while the number of state-funded places has not been reduced, but is not growing either. In general, the number of places for students seems to be growing, but the state budget does not keep up with this growth. These are my intuitive observations that would need to be checked with statistics.
At the same time, the process of turning higher education into a service where “the student is always right” is not happening. In US universities, many teachers feel that they are simply working for students, as in a commercial enterprise. Russian universities are under the fairly direct hierarchical control of local and federal authorities. One cannot say that universities strongly heed student demands.
The logic for the existence of Russian universities is different. In the US, universities aim to attract students, who in turn will bring in a lot of money. Russian universities also have this goal, of course, but there is no shortage of students: Russian state money will still come, and these funds are more important to the economy of the university. There is no special competition between universities.
Katya: The problem with the commercialisation of universities in Russia is that we do not have a system of preferential student loans. I do not know of any cases where a student would take out a loan for their education. But at the same time, a very limited stratum of households can afford paid education at a top university. Access to good higher education remains limited.
I do not have any sense that Russia is following the “psychologisation” trend that you describe. The educational ideology that is being promoted now, the ideology of the self-made student and the researcher, assumes that if the student does not do something on their own, no one will come and suggest to them: “Hi, let’s join forces, apply for this grant, for that programme.”
On the contrary, there is a sense of living in a highly polarised atmosphere. The university says to me: “Let’s spend your entire third year doing only work on projects instead of studying,” and, nevertheless, I have no sense that there is any mentoring support available.
The teacher should impart some skills and offer some support in this situation. The student must convert this support into knowledge production. But these two threads are disconnected – the teacher is overloaded with bureaucratic and personal matters, and the student needs to pass their exams, somehow finding work along the way to feed themselves.
If I want to do something, I look for co-researchers on my own, I search for funding on my own, I search for ideas on my own, I help myself. In technical universities, a different system is already emerging – students come together in research teams, in collectives based on mutual assistance. But to get there, you still need to overcome the barrier of the “self-made student” – first you need to stand alone like a wolf, howl and suffer, and then, maybe, someone will let you join the pack. You still need to be prepared for the fact that you are on your own.
Translated by Giuliano Vivaldi. This is an abridged version of the full interview, published here in Russian.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
