From Partnerships to Bureaucracies: The Constitutional Evolution of Russian Universities

Abstract

Russian university is treated as a miniature political system in this article. Four hundred charters, statutes and ordinances are analyzed in order to identify three pivotal axes allowing us to classify constitutional frameworks of universities: the axis of independence from the principal the axis of collegiality, or the balance of power between the rector and the Academic Council and the axis of federalization, which shows how decentralized the organizational structure is. Next, it is shown how these variables are interrelated and how their stable sets form types of intra-university political systems-federative, unitary, dual and controlled-which exist or used to exist in Russia. Contrary to the widely held belief that all of the differences between universities can be traced to their position on the scale of "collegiality" (partnership model) vs. "managerialism" (bureaucratic model) and although public universities do resemble bureaucracies more than partnerships today, different elements of their constitutional design seem to have evolved independently and under the influence of different factors.

Becoming a university leader: Changes in publication patterns

“…The Russian state has invested a lot of resources into transforming the HE system in the 2000s and 2010s. Russian authorities tightened the control over higher education institutions to increase their effectiveness and optimize the overall number of universities through university mergers, regular inspection, and monitoring appointment of university leaders in public universities (Sokolov et al, 2018). A closer control was obtained over public universities which are directly subordinate to the state ministries.…”