Increasing the Research Capacity of Universities in Ukraine: Problems, Value Dimensions and the Way of Democratization

Abstract

There are certain obstacles to the development of the research capacity of Ukrainian universities, which can be classified as belonging to one of the two groups: «external» and «internal». If the former include more obvious things like insufficient funding for national science and higher education, as well as the imbalance of teaching and research activities of the academic staff, the latter relate to the values, interests and motivations of the researchers. It is argued that a possible way to overcome the first type of obstacles is to rethink the role of the university teacher, who from a translator of knowledge becomes a mediator helping students to acquire the ability for life-long self-education and the constant creation of own knowledge. The competition to traditional universities presented by non-formal education emphasizes the benefits of the individual approach and personal communication between teachers and students and the special value of the personal knowledge as a result of own research. The article argues that in the absence of internal motivation for scientific research and a tendency to recognize the principles of scientific ethos, the attempt to «force» creativity leads only to the profanation of scientific activity, in particular to mass violations of academic integrity by students. Really effective research can be based only on the moral imperative of each human person as an autonomous subject of values and responsibility, and the most important factor in the development of university science is the democratization of higher education, which returns to the humanistic ideal of the Enlightenment that considers each person as capable of creative and independent thinking. Such democratization contributes to the implementation of lifelong learning and effective activities of university graduates in a volatile and complex world, and also corresponds to the ideas of the open science concept as one of the most important ways for increasing the research capacity of Ukrainian universities.