BY HANK REICHMAN

A bit over two years ago I posted to this blog a piece about a decision by Russia’s prosecutor general to designate New York’s Bard College as an “undesirable organization.” Since 1997, Bard had been collaborating with St. Petersburg State University, offering a program of open enrollment liberal arts courses for students of SPbU and other higher education institutions in St. Petersburg. Bard and SPbU jointly created the Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the first institution to offer a liberal arts bachelor’s degree program in Russia. The decision to label Bard as “undesirable” effectively ended the US college’s participation in the program and called into question whether the Smolny program could survive.

Now that question has been answered. As Pola Lem of Times Higher Education reports, Smolny “has ended its liberal arts programme, marking the formal end of a top institution—and the death knell for a once promising form of education in the country.”

“Over the summer,” Lem reports, the Smolny “administration reportedly announced that a new curriculum would replace its liberal studies programme—a move it said was meant to comply with federal accreditation standards. Going forward, Smolny students will be able to choose 10 of 12 courses. Out of 21 English courses, only two remain, according to the Save Smolny campaign.”

Smolny has experienced a sharp change in fortune in the past two years. In 2021, Alexei Kudrin, previously Russia’s finance minister and then dean of Smolny, announced it would become an independent institution. The Kremlin’s official approval, though, never came through. That June, its US-based partner, Bard College, was named an “undesirable organisation” by Russia’s government, forcing Smolny to stop giving out dual degrees.

The change marks a stark contrast to the thriving Smolny of just a couple of years ago, which boasted 12 majors and 129 courses, with 500 students receiving dual degrees from SPBGU and Bard.

Gone now are courses in topics “undesirable” to the prosecutor’s office, including gender studies, courses with a “problematic interpretation of World War II”, and those on current politics, feminism and human rights, said Marina Kalashnikova, who worked at Smolny for 12 years before becoming a dean in a similar liberal arts programme at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES), which was also forced to shut down by the Russian government.

“I’ve seen the new 2023 curriculum that this year’s freshmen will be taking—it’s a disaster,” said Professor Kalashnikova of Smolny’s new offerings.

“There is nothing there from [liberal arts]. It’s politics from the administration. They haven’t closed down the faculty and programme—but they’ve strangled it. There are still some students and faculty who remember what it was like. They are trying to fight, but this struggle is doomed; new generations of students will no longer study at Smolny.”

Dimitry Dubrovsky, a fellow at the Central and East European Law Initiative, Prague, and professor at Latvia’s Free University (Briva Universitate), agreed.

“Smolny was different from the rest of the university because students [had] the right to choose courses—and it was a broad list of courses. Now they lost it,” he said.

He noted that nearly a third of its previously 100-strong faculty have left over the past couple of years because of the changes.

Greg Yudin, professor of political philosophy at the MSSES, noted that even before the most recent changes, many academics involved with Smolny “considered the project dead” even if hope remained among its students.

He said that a similar process had taken place at his own institution, when government officials came and asked the university to “remove all mentions of liberal arts.” Administrators, he said, “tried not to change the structure of the programme but it eventually changed anyway.”

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October 2021.