Academic Liberation

Abstract

AbstractThe state authority model of governance, inherited from the Soviet Union, went through various transformations. The majority of former Soviet universities frame their identity as ‘classical’, which is often identified with the Humboldtian model. Yet, Humboldtian academic self-governance has been dormant in most contexts and the central tenets of the Humboldtian model—academic freedom and institutional autonomy—have acquired peculiar interpretations. Academic freedom is often seen as the freedom of universities to design courses in response to labour market needs, or the freedom of academics to choose between face-to-face and online modes of teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic; it is rarely understood to be the broader freedom of enquiry and expression within academia. The one-man management principle is the most widespread approach to university governance across former Soviet universities, the majority of which remain largely state-centred, sometimes government-run institutions. At the top of most university governance structures is a heavy-handed, powerful rector who is often intimately connected with the ruling party. Marketisation and internationalisation processes have led to the adoption of market models of university governance which curiously co-exist with the state-centred model. Degrees of academic freedom and university autonomy vary considerably in the region, with universities in the Baltics offering the practices closest to the academic self-rule model. At the other end of the spectrum are Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Belarus—countries where universities and academics continue to dance in shackles.