Overzealous regulators are closing in on universities

Mountains of pointless paperwork are making it nearly impossible for independent Russian universities to survive, with the average length of a course syllabus running to 30-40 pages, 10 times the length of the average syllabus in most universities across the world, writes Grigory Yudin for The Moscow Times.

Course syllabi are only one among thousands of documents collected and inspected each year by Rosobrnadzor, Russia’s Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency, which is tasked with issuing and revoking education licences and state accreditation. For a year before an inspection, both faculty and staff must prepare hundreds of boxes filled with the documents. Almost all are produced exclusively for inspectors and are never actually used in the classroom. This huge amount of work effectively paralyses the education process in many institutions.

A recent petition addressed to President Vladimir Putin from the Association of Leading Universities in Russia demands that the power to accredit universities be transferred to the academic community. The autonomy of Russian universities and their independence from Rosobrnadzor is the only way to ensure Russian science and education integrates into the international academy.
Full report on The Moscow Times site