2.11: Post-Soviet Higher Education

Hi. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education podcast.

In the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union, despite the immense destruction that had been wreaked across its territory by the Nazi invasion of 1941-44, shocked the world with its rapid acquisition of what was then high technology, in particular with respect to the nuclear and space sectors. It also rose quickly ot have the world’s second largest university system, just behind the United States. Its prowess in education and Science provoked huge investments in higher education in science.

But the thing about the Soviet success in higher education and science is that they were actually two different sets of successes. Unlike in North America, science — big science anyway — was to a significant extent conducted outside the university system in a series of laboratories and institutes which belonged to a central Academy of Sciences. This approach was not unknown in the west — bodies similar to the Academy still form a major part of the science system in France and Germany, for instance — but in the Soviet Union it was taken to a much higher level.

The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to a crumbling of science across post-Soviet space. It wasn’t just that funding for science and education collapsed: the very networks of science that criss-crossed the union were broken up as well. And, in time, policy for education and science began to diverge as well. Some countries joined the Bologna process and integrated into a ore western mode of operation. Some abandoned their Academies. Some did not. In effect, what were created were a whole bunch of little laboratory experiments about how well different kinds of research and higher education policy frameworks operate given similar starting conditions.

With me today is Professor Isak Froumin, Head of the Observatory of Higher Education Innovations at Jacobs University, in Bremen Germany. He’s the co-editor of two key books on what has happened to universities across the 15 ex-republics. The first, 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity, which appeared in 2018, and the second is Building Research Capacity at Universities: Insights from Post-Soviet Countries, out earlier this year from Palgrave Macmillan. Our discussion ranges over a wide variety of topics: how to develop system typologies in post-Soviet space, how various nations went about de-Sovietifcation and also how a few seem now to be re-Sovietizing just in the past couple of years. Isak’s range of knowledge across so many countries makes him an excellent guide to this set topics — so enough from me and over to Isak.

Alex Usher (AU): Before we get started on the main topic, the book that you edited with Maia Chankseliani and Igor Fedyukin is called Building Research Capacity: Insights from Post-Soviet Countries. But what does post-Soviet mean nowadays? It's 30 years since the end of the USSR. Is this a geographic term? Is it a historical term? What is it?

Isak Froumin (IF): It's my favorite question. I must tell you that very recently some of my friends from these countries told me that they feel that some flavor of colonialism in this term. I said that it's not post-Russian countries. We call them post-Soviet, and it's really historical. But to be fair, they convinced me or almost convinced me to start to call them ex-Soviet. As a non-native speaker, I don't feel real difference. These countries shared a common past, and I hope you and our audience knows what past dependence is. In many European cities, we still use roads built by Romans. If we do not recognize them, if we do not reflect this past that we depend on, we may have difficulties to understand our present. The last point, just to clarify why I think it's important to use this term, is that still 30 years later, almost half of the teaching force in higher education systems in these countries got their education in Soviet universities. So, they bring these norms, attitudes, et cetera. This is why I continue to use this historical commonwealth, I would say.

AU: Let's talk about their common past in the Soviet Union. The caricature of the Soviet research system is that all the research was separated out into institutes run by the Academy of Sciences and universities were just there for teaching. But that was never quite true, was it? There were always some universities which managed to keep a significant research presence Lomonosov in Moscow would be the most obvious, but some of the other research institutes there as well. But also, as you point out in the book, at least in official documents, university teachers were all supposed to be researchers at the same time as they were teachers. They weren't necessarily remunerated that way, but it was part of their job description. So, what was the actual state of researchers and research universities and research funding in the Soviet period? Why weren't there more universities like Lomonosov?

IF: More than 80 percent of doctoral students were trained at universities, not at research universities or at research institutes. The higher education sector produced the next generation of researchers for these countries. And indeed, we found that it was mandatory for each Soviet professor, assistant professor, lecturer, full professor, to have a yearly annual plan that should be approved by the university president. This plan had two parts: one is teaching and the second research. In the line with planned economy, each professor had to plan how many articles he or she will produce, etc. But there was a big difference. We found that we use the same word, research, for what we call science one and science two in an article that we are writing now. I would say that there were quite big distinctions between two sciences. Researchers within the Academy of Sciences, they had to compete on the global scale. They knew foreign languages, they read modern journals, et cetera. Most of research that were done at the universities, were of local nature, we can call them. There was no real rigorous evaluation. There was no peer review. So, I guess there are two different sciences and we hope that there will be more studies on these differences between them.

AU: What about the geographic dispersion of research universities in the Soviet Union? How much of the world class institutes and research universities were in Russia proper? To put it another way, how weak and uneven was the base that the other 14 successor countries had to build on after 1991?
IF: That's a difficult question. It's politically difficult question frankly speaking, because someone can accuse me to be imperialist in a sense, but I would refer to a book written by Terry Martin, Affirmative Action Empire. Terry is a history professor at Harvard, and he did a great job to see how the Soviet government tried to build research and education capacities in different Soviet republics. It was part of imperialism I would say, but imperialism which wanted to build not a very vertical system, but kind of distributed system with many centers and highly specialized universities. For example, I got my PhD at University of Latvia and there was Academy of Sciences in Latvia. The best Soviet research institute on pharmacology was in Latvia. Recently, I was in Turkmenistan. This is a country that we don't know much about.

AU: It's hard to get into. I'm impressed.

IF: Absolutely. It happened when I worked for the World Bank. I was talking with a person who was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, a member of the so-called Research Institute of Sun Energy because Turkmenistan is very sunny place. Or I grew up, for example, in Siberia where we have a lot of forest, and the Central Institute of Research in Forests and Wood was there. So, there was a deliberate policy to distribute the research system geographically. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it created a huge challenge because these countries inherited very imbalanced and strangely specialized system in a sense. The Institute of Sun was too big for Turkmenistan. The Institute of Pharmacology in Latvia worked with industry in all republics. It’s a very interesting question, and unfortunately... It created a whole a whole set of problems for the countries.

AU: When we talk about change in higher education systems over time and different countries have grown in different ways over the last 30 years, there's macro-level changes at the government level and there are micro-level changes at the institutional level. Let's start with the first. You have a sort of a typology where you say the Baltic nations plus Kazakhstan and Georgia share one type of macro response or policy direction in the post-Soviet period, because those are the countries that dismantled their academies and either transformed the research institutes into universities, or had the institutes absorbed into the universities. How difficult a process was this? What was the key to making that strategy work?

IF: That’s a fascinating question, but before I come to it, I would say that we still don't have a comprehensive typology or universal typology. In fact, when in 2017, we started a big first project to compare all 15 countries. We published this book with Jeroen Huisman and Anna Smolentseva in Palgrave in 2018. We had a different typology based on different landscapes, and we had Baltic countries, Central Asia, Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Caucasus. You refer to the typology based on the response to the challenges in building national research systems. And indeed, we found that there were some countries that decided to close or to convert academy of Sciences into clubs of senior scientists, I would say. For example, in Kazakhstan, they continue to receive some stipends from the government, but all institutes from the Academies of Sciences were moved either into universities or under the Ministry of Higher Education and Science. I have to admit that there was no rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of these policies. Probably because all countries, unfortunately, invested very little into research in both cases. If they dismantled Academies of Sciences or they kept Academies of Sciences, we observed the decline of research funding everywhere, and it was probably more important factor than organizational.

AU: In the other 10 countries where the academies were maintained, at least in some form, were there examples where there were successes in research? What's the counter argument to remaking universities on a European or Anglo-American model the way the Baltic countries did? Russia has some special success, but has one of the other countries have special success keeping the academies?

IF: To be fair, Russia is kind of an intermediate example. The only country that kept the Academy of Sciences completely intact is Belorussia. I would say Russia did half reform because Russia kept the Academy of Sciences, they even increased stipends for the members. But administratively, these institutes now more depend on the ministry. I would say we don’t see success in any model. In fact, Kazakhstan probably has some success compared with the initial level when they started to invest into that. But again, that's a good example when there was no rigorous evaluation of this institutional change.

AU: Let's turn to those structural issues. As you say, there's a fair bit of path dependency there. In Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, my impression is that those universities in those countries now look a lot like other northern European universities, because there were a lot of bilateral contacts and exchanges, and of course there was integration into the European Union, and so they, they look a lot like the rest of northern Europe. But in the rest of the ex-Soviet Union, again, my impression is just there's a commonality in the way that ministries of higher education try to control institutions. The accountability relationships are quite different and in the way universities themselves are run. Your co-editor, Maia Chankseliani put it in another book. She talked about rector feudalism, which is a term I love actually, and that there's actually a fair bit of commonality across the other 12 countries that way. Is that fair? What would be the nuances you would put on that picture?

IF: We observe this not rector feudalism, but this growing managerialism everywhere. I think that an important factor. The ministries have stronger hand in non-Baltic countries, let me say. But I guess that such factors, like Bologna process are important. Almost all countries joined Bologna process. Even now, Russia declared that it left Bologna process. But it's so funny, they just call master level now specialized higher education and bachelor is now basic higher education. But it's still a two-tier system. Another thing is the role of international ranking. All the ministries in all these countries report to the presidents or to their parliaments mainly about the positions of their universities in international ranking. This is much stronger force then strange regulations made by the ministries.

AU: What about the lives of individual academics? How much would have changed over the past 30 years? If we jump over that decade where no one was getting paid and then the financial future was very difficult. If I compare someone now to the late 1980s, where would the changes in the life of an individual academic have changed the most and what would have changed the least?

IF: Unfortunately, there are almost no changes in kind of feeling academic independence. I agree with my friend and co-author, Maya Csikszentmihalyi, that it's a big problem. Academics feel very dependent on the rector, on the minister, et cetera. It’s important to mention that one of the legacies from the Soviet time is that there are no lifetime contracts. There are no tenure systems. It didn't exist in Soviet Union. Every five years you had to go through the competitive procedure, and it exists today as well. Another thing that didn't change is the huge teaching load. Despite all talks about research capacity, et cetera, ~90 percent of professors don't have a teaching load less than they would have 30 years ago. That's a huge problem.
What's changed, I guess that in many countries, not everywhere and not in all universities, but at universities that try to be leaders, this idea of moving from science two to science one, when you have to not just publish something, but you have to go through rigorous evaluation, you have to publish in reputable journals. You have to reference international colleagues. That's a very important change. We observe it almost in every country, but not in at every university, as I mentioned.

AU: I'm curious about two Central Asian countries in particular that seem to me to have a lot of potential, at least in the medium term. Kazakhstan where you and I were working earlier this year, and Uzbekistan. These are increasingly wealthy countries. They have huge youth populations and until fairly recently quite small university populations. So, you see this massive expansion of opportunity and some of it's going to be met by Russian or other foreign universities opening branch campuses there. But neither has a very broad base of research universities. What's going to happen here? These are countries that they want research universities. They want to be part of that global scientific dialogue. And they're going to put a lot of money into higher education, but at the same time, they have got really big access problems or challenges to deal with. What do you think their path is going to be going forward? Are they likely to chart a very different path when it comes to research intensive universities?

IF: Many years ago I met Teodor Shanin, a Cambridge professor who was asked by Open Society Foundation to build Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. We discussed with him this endeavor, and because I would compare Russian standing in social and economic sciences with today's standing of, let's say, Uzbekistan, with all my respect, in area of computer science. Theodore told me this famous story that if you want to have what Cambridge has, you have to have three generations go to Cambridge. So that’s the first answer, we cannot expect the results too quickly. The second answer is yes, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have a lot of similarities, but Uzbekistan in terms of policies is very much behind Kazakhstan. They started this real investment into universities into modernization of higher education just a few years ago. However, in Kazakhstan for example, Nazarbayev University is increasingly moving ahead. Much slower than it was expected, but it's moving. So, I think that these countries are trying to build more than effective system of competitive research support. They understand that they need this international cooperation. I'm quite optimistic, but again I spoke with a couple of ministers in Kazakhstan, and they all want the results very fast. It cannot happen.

AU: That’s a very common problem internationally. Let me ask you one last question. Looking forward, let's say we're going forward to say 2041, which would be the 50th anniversary of the dissolution of the USSR. Will we still be talking about post-Soviet universities? And which aspect of Soviet-ness might be most likely to endure in the region's universities?

IF: First, I wish you and I will be able to check if what I'm going to say will be true in 10 years. I think that the picture will be more diverse and unfortunately, I see that Russia and Belorussia are trying to do what my colleague Igor Chirikov called re-Sovietization. It's really ridiculous how many statements about the glorious past I hear during last two years, and that's another story. Re-Sovietization of the Russian higher education. I know that many people are quite sober, and they don't want to believe into these myths, but that's a policy now. I think that, at least for a few countries, we'll talk about Post Soviet and Soviet legacy, I'm sure. Will other countries keep this legacy? In my opinion, depends on their reflectiveness. Again, I think that we have to study more of these remains of these ancient roads. There is a very simple example. The Soviet system was very highly specialized, and it had a lot of highly specialized universities, agricultural, medical, etc. China many years ago, completely changed this system and established comprehensive universities, even but we see that, for example, in Kazakhstan and in Uzbekistan, for some reason they decided to re-establish teacher training universities, so I'm afraid that without a critical reflection of this legacy, there is a big risk that under new slogans, we'll see a “glorious past” emerging again.

AU: Isak, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for joining us.

IF: Alex, thank you for this opportunity. I enjoy your podcasts and I'm very honored to be part of it. Thank you.

AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners, for tuning in. If you have any comments or suggestions for the show, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guest will be Rob Kelchen. He's the head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and a well-known author and higher education commentator. He'll be with us to discuss the top 10 higher education stories from the United States in 2023. Bye for now.