Global university rankings and Russia's quest for national sovereignty

Abstract

Why have regimes and societies that would otherwise argue for their distinctiveness and sovereign decision-making caught 'ranking fever' in HE? Why are they willing to give up their sovereignty in the field of HE, and why do they accept the requirement of homogeneity to succeed in global university rankings? This paradox is explored in the case of Russia. The ranking discourse is analysed at the national and institutional levels using interviews, documents, and media materials. The impetus to 'internationalise' education and research, and the aspiration to be globally ranked, is explained using the status, neoliberal competition and state control frames. These conflict with 'nationalisation' part of the discourse, manifested in the resistance to global university rankings and the debates surrounding a Moscow-based ranking. These debates confirm that there is a willingness to internationalise and integrate Russian HE into the neoliberal model of HE on Russia's terms in preference to self-isolation.

Debating academic boycotts and cooperation in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine

“…Despite the severing of ties between European and Russian universities, some individual scholars have maintained their connections both outside and within Russia. This has left Russia some room to continue their pre-war internationalisation policy aimed at enhancing the competitiveness of Russian higher education on the global stage (Mäkinen, 2021; Shenderova, 2018a, 2021). According to my analysis of university websites, there are several such double-affiliated scholars, mainly social scientists.…”

“…As Abed (2007: 85) suggests in his defence of the academic boycott of Israel, the perpetrator society should be “susceptible to outside pressure.” An academic boycott of Sudan, he argues, would not be as likely to succeed as that of Israel, as the latter attaches great value to international academic connections. Sirke Mäkinen’s (2016, 2021, 2022) research shows that higher education has been one of the arenas in which the Russian state has sought recognition for its status. Yet, according to Svetlana Shenderova’s contribution in this forum, despite the rhetoric, the current regime has been reluctant to invest in the internationalization of higher education and research.…”

On Politics in Comparative and International Higher Education

“…Meanwhile, the reluctance to include academic freedom as a criterion stands in stark opposition to findings by leading scholars in the field, who convincingly argue that academic freedom, as much as "favourable governance", is essential for developing and sustaining the kind of research that elicits a WCU's top performance in the global leagues (Karran and Mallinson 2019;Mittelman 2017;Salmi 2009). By excluding an assessment of the status of academic freedom when ranking universities, the global rankers show bias, or one may argue, a lack of integrity -given that their predilection for commercial inclusivity is aimed at targeting bigger profits from political regimes that suppress academic freedom, and propelling the pursuit of status goods or governmentally-assigned geopolitical 'gaming' at their leading universities (Chirikov 2021;Holz 2021;Mäkinen 2021;Miao and Huang 2020).…”

Authoritarian Modernisation and Academic Freedom: the Contradictions of Internationalisation and “Pockets of Effectiveness” in Russian Higher Education

“…Universities started to be perceived as prestige boosters on the international stage. 28 For individual universities, the internationalisation drive, which has plentiful potential benefits associated with knowledge co-creation and sharing, morphed into a necessary task and a performance indicator. A skewed motivation structure drove university leadership to seek managers who could "do internationalisation" for them.…”