a petition re the russian state university of the humanities (rggu)

[Rossen Djagalov]

Dear Alina (if I may),

If you examine the results of the Ministry's survey (http://img.rg.ru/pril/article/69/21/72/Monitoring_vuz.pdf), you'll see that branches are evaluated separately from the main campuses and a number of RGGU's branches have escaped the "inefficient" label that befell RGGU's main campus in Moscow.

While you are right to be concerned about the mushrooming of satellite campuses and the quality of education they offer, even this issue is not that simple: http://annavlochkina.livejournal.com/44932.html.

However great the problems within Russian universities, one thing that is certain is that heavy-handed state intervention into their operations (combined with the overall reduction in the upcoming educational budget; for that's the larger context of the current reforms) won't lead to "soul searching" on part of the university but most likely to chaos, faculty and staff layoffs, and ultimately, reduced educational and social opportunities for many young people in Russia. The use of (by the way, atrociously constructed: http://www.fgosvpo.ru/index.php?menu_id=21&menu_type=4&parent=0&id=174) rankings in this case only gives ministry administrators the justification to launch such interventions. I won't even touch on the whole language of "efficiency" in terms of which the report is couched. Gasan Gusejnov has an elegant piece about it: http://www.russian.rfi.fr/rossiya/20121107-lunnaya-effektivnost-ili-sirano-de-berzherak-o-nashei-zhizni

It's certainly not the case things at RGGU are all rosy and the university doesn't need any reform. Last year, for example, the administration reduced faculty salaries without even informing the people affected in advance. (Unfortunately, that's not an untypical occurrence in Russian universities.) But the argument we tried to make in the petition was that the university's own faculty, who have made it over the last 20 years one of Russia's most respected institutions of higher education, rather than ministry officials are the people who need to be empowered to make those reforms. 

I wish you well,
Rossen

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