Is academic freedom feasible in the post-Soviet space of higher education?

Abstract

The legacy of totalitarianism thwarts discourse and practice of academic freedom in post-Soviet universities. For legacy-holders, “academic freedom” causes disorientation, irresponsibility, demoralization and inequity. They see more threats than benefits from empowering decision-makers who are non-compliant with local bureaucracy. For innovators, freedoms enhance flexibility and creativity. However, granting such freedom also reinforces value clashes on campuses and tends to intensify feelings of guilt and shame in regard to actions which show a disrespect of authority and tradition. While both legacy-holders and innovators endeavour to redefine their practices and norms in their teaching, they appear to still struggle to shed their predispositions to a paternalistic and colonial philosophy of education. Presumably curative, their engagement with international networks of scholarship exposes their particular positions of vulnerabilities to that end. Both groups continue to push patriotism and cultural idiosyncrasy in order to hedge their power and status in the global marketplace of ideas. As in the past, a discourse of anti-westernization prevails, shoring up legacies of regulative thinking, indoctrination, and insularity. Progressive academics succeed primarily by taking bold steps to go above and beyond the dominant discourses and norms within their universities and policy-building communities. This article explicates why, in turn, a “surrogate academic freedom” tends to emerge as a conundrum across the post-Soviet higher education space.

Keywords:

• Academic freedom
• higher education
• post-Soviet university

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Data collection for this article was supported by GRF grant #17665816 of the Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee of Hong Kong.

Notes on contributors

Anatoly V. Oleksiyenko

Anatoly V. Oleksiyenko is Associate Professor in Higher Education at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on agency of internationalization in higher education and dilemmas of governance and leadership in neoliberal and post-Soviet research universities. His papers on these issues can be found in such journals as Higher Education, Higher Education Policy, and Higher Education Quarterly. Oleksiyenko’s paper “On the Shoulders of Giants? Global science, resource asymmetries, and repositioning of research universities in China and Russia” (Comparative Education Review) received CIES-HESIG’s Best Article Award in 2016, and his book Global Mobility and Higher Learning (Routledge) won the Best Book Award from CIES’ SIG International Students and Study Abroad in 2019. Recently he has published a critical inquiry on glonacality of international partnerships - see volume Academic Collaborations in the Age of Globalization (Springer). He also co-edited a book International Status Anxiety and Higher Education: The Soviet Legacy in China and Russia (CERC-Springer), and a Special Issue “Higher Education and Human Vulnerability: Global Failures of Corporate Design” (Tertiary Education and Management).