Strengthening academic leadership from above: the ‘Renewal’ of Russian university leaders

ABSTRACT

In recent years, university sectors worldwide have undergone intense reforms under the influence of the global ideas of ‘new public management’ and ‘new managerialism’. National policies have widely adopted global scripts with advocacy for strengthening academic leadership as the essential ingredient of successful university transformation. However, how direct is the link between the policy reforms and the changes in the composition of academic leaders? To provide insight into this question, we examined national policy changes in the formal procedure of rector selection from the election to the appointment and the consequences of these changes. We tested the specific hypothesis that the policy reform on the selection procedure has catalysed significant changes in rector leadership towards increasing (1) rector replacement in universities with weak performance, (2) external recruitment, (3) recruitment from the natural and life sciences and diminishing (4) academic credentials. The hypotheses were tested using data on the 136 rector replacements that have occurred in Russian public universities. The data show that, in general, strong support does not emerge from the top-management level to claim that a ‘traditional’ academic career pathway has been reduced in favour of a new type of leader more suited to strong leadership. We concluded that the national policy tends to adopt those elements of global ideas that provide local benefits. The leadership change not only enables the state to symbolically exhibit proper behaviour but also to strengthen control over public universities.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic leadership
• university governance
• new managerialism
• rector
• university leaders
• Russian universities

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Asya Mironenko for her assistance in the early stage of the project. We also would like to thank Simon Oertel, Lars Engwall, Christine Musselin, and all participants of the sub-theme The Corporatization of Academic Leadership organized by the European Group of Organizational Study for their valuable advice. We are also grateful for the constructive comments on our article by the anonymous reviewers. This research received support from the Russian Science Foundation (Grant Number 21-78-10102).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 University leaders have different titles across countries; their positions may be termed the university president (US), the vice-chancellor (UK), or the rector (Russia).

2 The most recent example of rectors’ loyalty is the letter issued by the Russian Union of Rectors in favour of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (https://www.rsr-online.ru/news/2022-god/obrashchenie-rossiyskogo-soyuza-rektorov1/). By the end of the March 2022, the letter has been signed by 305 rectors out of 1222 HEIs.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Russian Science Foundation: [Grant Number 21-78-10102].

Notes on contributors

Katerina Guba

Katerina Guba is a lead researcher at the Centre for Institutional Analysis of Science and Education, European University at St. Petersburg. In 2015, she earned a Candidate of Sciences degree in Sociology after completing a thesis on the comparative analysis of the journal publishing market in American and Russian sociology. Her current research focuses on the process of evaluation of Russian academic organizations that demonstrates a curious combination of attraction to formal performance indicators and the inability to use them.

Daria Gerashchenko

Daria Gerashchenko is a junior researcher at the Centre for Institutional Analysis of Science and Education, European University at St. Petersburg. In 2019, she received a Master of Arts in Public Policy at Central European University. Her current research focuses on academic leadership and its correspondence with university performance.