L'enseignement supérieur en Russie aujourd'hui

Abstract

Unlike the Soviet political and economic systems, the country's higher education system survived the fall of Communism, although it went through a very deep crisis, one whose impact is still being felt. This article aims to describe and explain the Russian higher education system's current complexity and to link its evolution with the country's traditional and contemporary political practices. The survival of the education system is due to multiple factors - among them its resourcefulness and capacity to adapt, the increasing number of services offered by an endlessly rising number of establishments, the development of a private sector both opposed to and within the traditional public one. 2005 saw the publication of a « national plan » for higher education as part of the State revival scheme launched by President Putin. The measures were mainly of a financial nature, reflecting the rules of the new public management whose underlying idea is that as stronger universities emerge, weaker ones would either have to disappear or they would have to provide their own funding. Other measures, of a purely administrative nature, were issued with the same objective. The main aim of all these measures is the creation of world-class universities. This is a key element in the foreign policy of countries considered to be « Great Powers », an exclusive club which Russia wishes to be allowed to join. Becoming an attractive country for higher education, important as it may be, is a difficult objective to achieve with Russia's own resources. Indeed, Russia has to face various obstacles - a deep-rooted demographic crisis which diminishes its human resources, the global economic crisis (coming at a time when almost 60% of students must pay tuition fees), the need to re-invigorate the teaching profession and recruit new professors in order to modernise teaching and research, and finally, general corruption and increasing and widespread xenophobia. President Medvedev has recently increased considerably the Federal State's contribution to the funding of universities not only with the idea of creating a small number of world-class higher educational institutions but also in the hope of reducing the number of students having to pay tuition fees. This is to be considered as a real turning point in the politics of the Russian State. But supplying funding will hardly overcome the above-mentioned obstacles, more particularly corruption and xenophobia. Indeed, xenophobia is a general problem in Russia, not only an academic one, and corruption is rooted in the understanding of power inherited from ancient Russia and the Soviet era. The problem for the Russian State is therefore not only how profoundly to reform the universities, but also - and primarily - how to depart from ancient traditions effectively to modernise both Russian society and its conception of power.