BY HANK REICHMAN

Last month I had the privilege and honor of addressing a colloquium of faculty and advanced graduate students at the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP), Russia, which offers advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences. My topic was “The AAUP and the Struggle for Academic Rights in the U.S.”  The talk prompted a fascinating exchange of experience and ideas about academic freedom and university governance, continued with several faculty members over dinner, that I hope to discuss in a future post.  For now, let me simply thank EUSP Provost Veljko Vujačić and Dmitry Dubrovsky of the Center for Independent Social Research, who arranged my visit, for their hospitality.

The purpose of this post is to again call attention to the precarious position that these Russian colleagues now find themselves in.  As I have previously reported on this blog (here and then here), EUSP has been threatened with closure for some time.  At first it appeared that the threats were as much about the university’s occupancy of a valuable building, the Small Marble Palace, but acquisition of new quarters nearby has not ended the assault.  As of now, the university is operating in its own quarters — owned, not leased — but it is still not authorized to offer classes or admit students.

As Dubrovsky wrote last October, “the refusal to grant an education license (accompanied by an openly mocking comment by the deputy head of Russia’s education watchdog) as well as the loss of the building that the university has occupied since opening its doors” amount to “a serious violation of academic rights and freedoms.”

Here is a short summary of events, as reported in The Economist:

Controversy first hit in 2007 after the university received a €700,000 grant from the European Union as part of a project to monitor elections in Russia.  A subsequent fire inspection led to the temporary closure of the campus.  An inspection in 2016 by the Federal Service for Supervision in Education and Science found 120 violations of government rules, including a lack of stands displaying alcohol-awareness leaflets and the absence of a gym on campus. . . .

The supervisory body insists that it has nothing against the EUSP, and oddly enough even President Vladimir Putin has written in support of the university.  Some have speculated that the source of the trouble is Vitaly Milonov, a member of parliament.  He had lodged a complaint against the university a few months before the inspection, objecting to a gender-studies programme organised by the school’s department of political science and sociology.  Mr Milonov is known for his role in criminalising “homosexual propaganda directed toward minors” in 2013 and has now taken issue with the EUSP’s “unscientific” approach towards LGBT communities.

As Dubrovsky points out, the university survived the first crisis in 2007-08 when it was accused of “interfering in the internal affairs of the Russian Federation.”

The accusation was made at the highest level, making it clear that the university’s desire for innovation and modernisation was inconsistent with the open and democratic nature of this process.  Its involvement in an EU funded “Interregional Electoral Support Network” research and training project then triggered an official rebuke in the form of a “fire inspection crisis”: fire inspectors who had previously signed the necessary certificates suddenly discovered a number of serious breaches of health and safety regulations in the university’s venerable building, including a “previously unnoticed” cast iron staircase (installed in 1881) in the front hall.  The building was immediately shut down (in the interests of student safety, naturally) and the courts dutifully rubber stamped the fire inspectors’ decision.

The European University was saved from closure thanks to wide Russian and international support, mostly from the academic community but also from Russian Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin himself.  The university also showed that it was ready to make serious compromises, withdrawing from the EU-funded project. The conflict was resolved: the same court that a month earlier refused to listen to the university’s side of the question then ruled that EUSP could continue to function while gradually sorting out the “serious violations.”  Making an 18th century palace conform to 21st century health and safety regulations is, after all, not easy.

The present crisis differs from the previous one, argues Dubrovsky.  “If in 2008 it seemed like a storm in a teacup against a background of cooling relations between the EU and Russia, the situation today seems very different.  There are, to begin with, two main differences between then and now: the serious decline in Russia’s international reputation and the no less serious change in higher educational trends.”

Once again, the political motivations behind the attack on EUSP are hidden.  Even as the Russian Ministry of Education has recognized the university as excellent according to a range of criteria that it itself created for higher education, EUSP was again denied an education license for failing to meet building regulations, including fire safety standards. The university was also accused of “providing unreliable information” in its application for a new license.

Sociologist Grigory Yudin calls the attack on EUSP not just a warning sign for Russia’s universities, but a catastrophe, no matter who is organizing it:  “The attack on EUSP is a signal that the state doesn’t take its own development strategy for education seriously and is prepared to destroy those who are effectively implementing the tasks they have been given.”

Adds Dubrovsky,

It’s telling that EUSP has been accused of “subversive activities” only by an unknown informer, via the leak site “Close to the Kremlin”, though from here the picture of a global plot against Russian science, education and government is more than gloomy.  For the author of this “investigation”, EUSP is a foreign-financed think tank that educates the people who will in the future become “agents of influence strongly convinced in the superiority of liberal values and the inferiority of Russia’s governmental system.” . . .

Officially, of course, the whole thing is just “a matter of licensing and observing Russian law” and “nothing to do with politics.”  The instigator of the public prosecutor’s inspection, United Russia Duma deputy Vitaly Mironov, sees nothing wrong in the inspections and says that “you just need to work with documents better” — although he has more than once made statements about “students there being made to write essays defending the rights of sexual minorities and other devils and demons”.  And another St Petersburg politician, Andrey Anokhin, a city council deputy, wrote in the denunciation he sent to the public prosecutor’s office that “the university’s website promotes western values.”

In 2008, the attack on EUSP was straigthforward: it was ostensibly about fire safety, which meant an agreement could be reached.  But now that the university has relocated, the criteria it must address are increasingly vague and varied.  To this day the faculty and administration remain in the dark about who their attackers are and from whence they receive support.  As Dubrovsky argues, in 2008, it would appear that one person — Vladimir Putin — ultimately called the shots.  But now “there are more interested parties who are united, it appears, only by Putin’s obvious refusal to intervene directly.  Given the logic of the situation, perhaps the regime has changed to the extent that Putin can no longer become involved in the conflict, according to the logic that “the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal.”

Moreover, Dubrovsky adds, “in 2008, questions of ‘ideological security’ were in conflict with concerns over international reputation and the desire to maintain contact with the west — and this made protests by the international academic community quite effective.  Now, our post-Crimea situation makes such protests (EUSP has received dozens of letters of support) irrelevant.  Russia has already decided to ignore international public opinion.”

EUSP still commands considerable resources and its roughly 900 alumni — teachers and researchers at multiple institutions in Russia and abroad — are a potentially potent force.  Unlike some other independent centers it receives no foreign funds; its board includes some very powerful figures in Russian government and society.  But for now it lacks an educational license and it is unclear what demands it must meet to obtain one.

A rally in support of EUSP