Lost Opportunity in Russia
http://insidehighered.com/layout/set/print/news/2007/01/31/russia

It's not up there with the Long Telegram, but there's a semi-secret report
circulating in Washington and among foundation officials that tries to
explain Russia and why American institutions - despite a sustained period of
generosity - aren't achieving their aims there and may have failed to fully
comprehend the country.

The report is an in-depth analysis of a 10-year effort by the Ford
Foundation to encourage serious reforms in Russian higher education, and the
report's conclusions have implications that go well beyond that foundation.

Ford's efforts in many ways are similar to those of other top American
foundations that have spent nearly $1 billion since the fall of the Soviet
Union to try to reform academe there. And while the report documents notable
successes, it concludes that a shift in foundation priorities - away from
supporting individuals and toward supporting institutions - had a terrible
impact. And the report provides an unusually up close look at Russian higher
education, down to the classroom level, explaining why some disciplines are
in full recovery (economics) and others (political science) are for all
purposes non-existent.

The frankness of the report - and the fact that there was a public
discussion of it Tuesday - is highly unusual. Stephen Kotkin, the author of
the report and director of Russian studies at Princeton University, said in
a talk at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars that this is the fourth time he has produced a book-length
study of the impact of American or international foundations on higher
education in the post-Soviet Union.

But this is the first time he has ever discussed any of the studies. And
although the Ford Foundation, which commissioned the study, is calling it a
draft, and may never release it to the public, it gave its blessing to his
talk, and to his giving the report to some of the foundation leaders and
Russia experts who gathered for the session - a degree of public exposure
for such sensitive topics that he and others here said was notable. Some in
the audience said that Ford was probably only able to be so open because
last year it ended its efforts to reform Russian academe.

Kotkin stressed - in the opening of his talk and at the end, after realizing
that he had described some rather large failures - that Ford and other
foundations has accomplished a lot in Russian universities. Much of that
good he attributed to relatively early efforts in the period he studied
(1995-2005) in which Ford and others awarded grants to individuals for
research and educational projects, and attempted to build academic networks
of talented individuals. There is no shortage of talent in Russia, Kotkin
said.

And he explained that he didn't just take program officers' word for that,
but traveled throughout the country, tracking down professors who had
received grants, talking to their students, looking at their syllabuses,
reading their journal articles, etc. - trying to figure out if people who
had been helped were making a difference - and he said that they were.

But starting around 1997, and with more intensity in the years that
followed, foundations shifted gears, Kotkin said. They started looking for
the "mega-project" and wanted to make grants that would lead to
"institutional shifts." The view was "let's try to affect the state system
as a whole," and that meant awards focused on individuals were out, and
awards to institutes or departments were in. It was a "huge shift," he said.

The larger projects largely failed and did not result in the large-scale
societal changes that Ford and others wanted to encourage in higher
education, Kotkin said. And the "tragic element" is that the embryonic
efforts to create Russian-based ways to provide merit awards to academics
died out - while many millions of dollars were spent on programs that didn't
accomplish much. "There's nothing there now," he said. "It was done and it
was lost."

Others at the discussion said that this miscalculation was all the more
tragic because of the huge sums of money spent by foundations and the
reality that Russians and Russian experts "on the ground" advised against
the shift at the time. Blair A. Ruble, director of the Kennan Institute,
said that the report pointed to "a misfit" between philanthropic decision
making and what Russia needed. Foundation leaders have "a desire to make
claims about the system's transformation" and so they gravitate to larger
projects, regardless of whether they will succeed, he said.

"There's a natural drift to a big fix," he said.

John A. Slocum, co-chair of the Russian Higher Education Initiative of the
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, said part of the problem is
that foundations "see themselves as transformational" when there are times
that they do more good by moving ahead in relatively small steps. Slocum -
who joked about how the Ford Foundation was seen as a large foundation in
the pre-Gates Foundation era - said he worried that the "trend toward
gigantism" in the foundation world would lead to more situations like the
one described in Russia.

Steven Solnick, the Ford Foundation's Moscow representative (although it
ended its higher ed programs, it has several other initiatives in Russia),
said that amid all the talk of the glories of "new philanthropy" (in other
words, the Gates Foundation), there was much to be said for the traditions
of "old philanthropy." And although he said Ford hated being thought of as
"old philanthropy," he said there is "a lot to be said for stable
philanthropy" where you think less about "reinventing" everything and more
about "protected zones" for efforts that need time.

Pieces of the Pie

Kotkin said that there were many factors in play. And he said that
foundation officials weren't just "being foolish," but confronted difficult
situations. For instance, he said that each time a foundation supported an
individual academic, it created resentments among all of that academic's
colleagues (and superiors) in a department or university. "Each one creates
a lobby group saying: Where's my money too?"

Amid all of this "pushing and shoving for a piece of the pie," astute
department leaders would come forward to foundations, and promise that the
qualities that led a foundation to support one individual could be seen
exponentially if only a larger grant would go to the department. "If you are
in a foundation, you want to size it, you want to be right in a big way,"
said Kotkin, so these requests sounded sincere (even if many of them were
not).

Of the various success stories in Russian academe, Kotkin said that there
were clear disciplinary patterns. He said that he was most impressed with
the progress of economics. While the outstanding programs are relatively
few, the top economists in Russia have become part of the global economics
world, Kotkin said, sponsoring their own journals and having articles
accepted in top international peer-reviewed publications.

This may be surprising, but shouldn't be, Kotkin said. While Russia's
economy is far from any pure economic model, "it is a market economy, where
prices matter," so it's natural that economics should thrive.

Sociology, he said, has more pockets than economics, and some scholars are
doing excellent work, although not on the level of the economists.

Kotkin said his study focused on social sciences, because they had been a
particular interest of the Ford Foundation's, out of the belief that these
disciplines would help build a civil society. Other social science fields
are faring poorly, he said. Gender studies now exists, but it has "a
movement quality" and "is not an academic pursuit."

Political science, which received an "enormous investment" from Ford and
others, is "a failure," he said. He said that he could not find a
peer-review quality journal in political science in Russia and that the work
he saw by political scientists isn't real academic work by international
standards. Of real political science in Russia, he said: "You just can't
find it."

So with some individual successes but many institutional failures in Russia,
what is to be done?

Kotkin said that foundations still in Russia could do much good by
abandoning big reform efforts and focusing on merit grants to individuals,
helping scholars form Internet networks and create journals, and building a
local peer-review system (again, to strengthen the process of providing
grants to individuals).

He also said that to the extent there are small-scale programs that warrant
support, foundations need to work to make them "truly independent" rather
than just seeming to be independent. Hundreds and hundreds of books have
been written about the impact in Russia of the lack of property ownership on
most members of society. But Kotkin asked why foundations and others didn't
follow the implications of the books and make sure that small research
centers actually owned their buildings and had a level of independence they
now lack.

The most surprising idea Kotkin raised was a strategy he offered for
foundations that are still intent on transforming entire universities: "go
native." By this he suggested that American foundations take a look at
Russia under Putin, which isn't so different from centuries of Russian
leaders: "You have a guy on the top, his clients on the floor below, and
their friends everywhere." It's classic patronage system, with no emphasis
on merit.

But what if, Kotkin asked, "patronage" was viewed as a good thing - with the
stipulation that people who'd been selected based on merit selected others
based on merit, and so forth. A big stumbling block for reforming Russian
higher education so far, he said, has been that expected retirements of
old-style academic leaders have been slow in coming, but that can be delayed
only so long.

The goal for foundations, he said, should be to have their grant recipients
and those they have taught or worked with - all people selected on merit -
be "everywhere," just like friends of Putin are everywhere now. If Russian
society is based on interlocking relationships, "there are ways to use the
society's fundamental aspects" to promote worthy change, he said.

Ford and others should be looking at Moscow State University and thinking:
"We need our people there. Our alumni." But in terms of foundation money, he
said, give it to individuals and then spread the individuals around to help
out one another and promote their agenda.

"Who would think to use Putin's strategy like that?" he asked.

- Scott Jaschik
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http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/31/russia.