It’s easier to destroy than build, or, a University of transitions

21.07.2010 — Analysis

The tenth Russian-German forum known as the Petersburg Dialog has just ended in Ekaterinburg. The distinguished guests, including Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, were received at Ural Federal University. In any event, it seemed to the guests that that’s where they were. Actually, "Ural Federal University" is nothing more than a name. In fact, everything at UFU, the physical location, the material and technical resources, the patents, the students, and the instructors, are all part of Ural State Technical University (USTU). Soon this newly-created university will also absorb Ural State University, named after Maxim Gorky. In theory, it’s not a bad idea. But in the meantime, experts are afraid that if it materializes in the form in which it was conceived, it won’t work. RusBusinessNews has the story on the Napoleonic plans of Ural Federal University’s founding fathers and the risks faced by the university community. 

One "helmsman" and 10 assistants 

October 21, 2009 marked the official start of the campaign to organize UFU, when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the Order to Establish Federal Universities in the Northwest, Volga, Ural, and Far Eastern Federal Districts. Early in June of 2010, an entry was made in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities for the Federal State Autonomous Institution of Higher Professional Education Ural Federal University, named for the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. Viktor Koksharov, the former prime minister of the Sverdlovsk region government, was also officially confirmed as university chancellor.

He will have the assistance of two vice-chancellors in managing this huge beast, Anatoly Matern and Dmitry Bugrov, the heads of USTU and USU, as well as 8 provosts, including Aleksandr Sobolev, the former minister of education for the Sverdlovsk region, and Oleg Gushchin, the former director of the currently disbanded regional department of youth. According to Viktor Koksharov, UFU’s new charter also provides for the position of university president.

Huge does not mean better 

As Aleksei Klyuev, the director of USU’s Institute of Management and Entrepreneurship, told RusBusinessNews, some of the project’s biggest risks come from the planned size of the university. It is expected to enroll 52,000 students by 2012, 57,000 by 2016, and 65,000 by 2020. The number of instructors will grow during this time from 6,000 to nearly 9,000. Ural Federal University will include institutes, scientific and educational centers, technology parks, Shared-Access Centers, a Business School, a School of Advanced Engineering, an Institute for Supplementary Professional Education, a Center for Pre-University Preparation and Vocational Guidance, university branches in various cities in the Ural Federal District and countries of the CIS, a biological research center, an observatory, dissertation advice, and much more. But the larger it becomes, the more unwieldy it becomes, and the greater the risk that the university’s administration will become enmeshed in bureaucracy.

"It’s hard for me to imagine that such a huge organization could operate effectively, given the way things work in Russia. It will be incredibly complicated to get through to those at the top," asserts Dr. Dmitry Strovsky, PhD, Political Science, a professor in the journalism school at USU.  

Aleksei Klyuev believes that these risks can be managed through a careful blend of centralization and decentralization. A number of western countries, especially the US, have a successful history of creating an effective management system within a large university, by finding just the right recipe for distributing authority. But Russian universities usually have archaic administrative systems, intent on reproducing their own clannish, bureaucratic, organizational culture, that is nothing like the entrepreneurial and innovative culture of the world’s leading universities.

Synergy will solve everything 

Instructors at Ural State University have a lot of questions about the structure of UFU, or rather, about how the different institutes will organized, by academic field, by the availability of corresponding training programs, or in some other way. For example, the departments of history, philology, journalism, art history, and cultural studies will be part of the humanities institute.

"What’s the rationale for lumping these departments together?" asks Dmitry Strovsky. He believes that the journalism department would be better placed with the social and political sciences, not with the humanities. That’s why it’s hard to believe in synergy. And the fate of USU’s Institute of Management and Enterpreneurship is still unclear. According to Aleksei Klyuev, a project has been developed to create an Institute of Management and Marketing Innovations, which could bring together the plans to train managers at all stages of the innovation cycle. This would have a big influence on one of the most weakly-developed elements of the regional system of innovations. This approach differs from the traditional one, in which related branches of study are grouped into institutes, however it is precisely these interdisciplinary organizations that can provide a synergistic effect and lend a new tone to the university. 

As Professor Aleksei Babushkin, PhD, Physical and Mathematical Sciences and dean of the physics department at USU, believes, the primary difference between USTU and USU is their internal atmosphere. USTU is an engineering school and engineers demand precise organization and order. In addition, the technical university is huge and USU is very compact. "We are a university in the classic sense. We offer a good education, as opposed to preparing someone for a particular field of work. Here, philosophers mingle with physicists and historians," notes Aleksei Babushkin. Vladimir Tretyakov, the former chancellor and current president of USU used the term "democratic slackness" to describe the collegiate atmosphere. The professor believes that this “democratic slackness” is one of the university’s greatest assets, which would need to be preserved (within limits) at UFU.

Physicists vs. poets 

While Aleksandr Misharin, the governor of the Sverdlovsk region, and chancellor Viktor Koksharov are in the US and Western Europe, introducing their university "in blueprints," the instructors from the two original universities smoke nervously. A large Academic Council will emerge as a result of the USU-USTU merger, with representatives from all the departments. As Dmitry Strovsky  noted, it is logical that the number of council members, in accordance with the universities’ traditions, would reflect the numerical composition of the departments. So, as it turns out, there will be far more representatives from USTU's technical fields in the Academic Council, than from USU's humanities departments.  

"How can issues that come up for discussion in the Academic Council be resolved fairly, when the tech-guys will obviously carry so much more weight? Who can guarantee that the interests of the humanities departments will be protected?" - the professor is trying to figure this out. Dmitry Strovsky believes that despite the fact that Viktor Koksharov, the chancellor of USU, was trained as a historian, his support for the humanities cannot be taken for granted. When it comes to prioritizing the goals that will get most of the money, obviously the liberal arts scholars are going to lose out to the engineers.

Money, money, money 

The financing for the Ural Federal University is supposed to come from various sources. Among them, a five-year subsidy from the state budget and some targeted investment programs of the Russian federal government. An allocation of funds is also expected from the coffers of the Sverdlovsk region as part of some specially-designated regional programs. The university ideologists are also counting on private investment. There are many money "streams," outside of the budget, that will supply some financing for Ural Federal University. Some, in particular, will fund research work and corporate-sponsored development projects, grants, and donations.

Financing in the amount of 9.1 billion rubles is proposed for the first phase (2010-2012). Then 28.4 billion rubles during the second phase (2013-2016). It is at that time that there are plans to build the university campus. Then 14 billion rubles during the third phase (2017-2020). By the end of 2016 there are plans to create the UFU Endowment Fund from private donations, totaling at least 5 billion rubles.

The magnitude of all of this is impressive, but, as Aleksei Babushkin fairly notes, there’s no such thing as a lot of money. "It’s better not to even speak aloud about federal funding – you’ll jinx yourself. And it’s not easy to find sponsors. Once, a businessman I knew made the statement, “A sponsor always wants to become an investor,” meaning that he wants to see a financial payoff. But we’re working with basic sciences, and finding practical applications takes a long time," he acknowledges.

The university campus will be on two sites, totaling 1,500 hectares. How the physical space of the campus is divided up will be very important. The undergraduate and the bulk of the professional education will be located at USU and USTU, and the Masters and PhD students will start their studies there as well, and then migrate over to the new campus.

Experts strongly doubt that UFU will be one of the top 200 universities in the world. "Look at the infrastructure they have at European universities. We don’t have anything. What is it that’s going to make us the best?" Dmitry Strovsky asks in amazement. In order to be one of the top 200, you have to have modern sports and research facilities, world-class laboratories, a ten-million-volume library, a hospital for staff and students and much more.  

So, the idea of building UFU in Ekaterinburg is a promising one, but there are a lot of doubts about whether it will ever materialize. It all depends on a lot of different things. Meanwhile, the 2010 graduates of the original two universities express their sympathies for those students who will enter one school and then have to do their cramming in a different one.

Anna Khorkova