Creating the History of University. Review of the book: Vishlenkova Y., Savelyeva I. (eds) (2013) The Social Class of Russian Professors. Architects of Statuses and Implications.

Abstract

A lot of potential is held by classifying university research as an individual discipline. Its evolvement is now progressing through conceptualizing the subject field and testing various disciplinary approaches towards describing the university as a heterogeneous object. The reviewed multi-authored monograph serves an example of how efforts of experts in different fields can be efficiently integrated to study the range of problems associated with university existence and transformation. The monograph includes a number of original authors’ theories that may help define the unique features of the new disciplinary field. The articles contained in the monograph refer to the critical oeuvres and ideas that provided for the tools required for present-day einterpretation of the notion of university; the authors unveil the paradoxes of “the great historical narrative” that come to surface when traditions of the past are revised for the sake of the present; the monograph also investigates into the issue of discursive nature of historical sources and narratives created on their basis.