Sometimes, I think back to 40 or 50 years ago and imagine what my job would have been like and I realise it would have been more or less impossible.  My shtick is mostly “the guy in Canada who knows what’s happening elsewhere” – and back then it was practically impossible to know what was going on in other countries.  There were some books, of course, but they were necessarily occasional and tended to touch only on the most basic structural elements of a system.  Apart from that, there was whatever you could find in the Times Higher Education Supplement and the Chronicle of Higher Education.  I remember as late as 1993 it was virtually impossible to learn about student assistance in non-English speaking countries: I once had to resort to writing to embassies and national ministries of education (the haul was not impressive).

And that was just what it was like in countries with relatively high amounts of press freedom.  If you tried to work out what was going on in, say, Eastern Europe, there were really only “official” government sources.  The downside was that they only told you exactly what they wanted you to hear.     The upside was that you got a very clear picture of what they thought was most noteworthy about their own system.  Take, for example, a little pamphlet from the Soviet Union dated 1976.  It’s actually a pretty fascinating little document, published by the Novosti Press Agency Publishing House.

The piece starts by extolling the amazing progress the Soviet Union made over the course of the previous 60 years in extending educational opportunity, which in truth was pretty phenomenal and maybe communism’s greatest accomplishment.  And there’s the usual stuff about technological prowess (“our universities have 70 digital and 400 analog computers!”), bizarrely detailed statistics about fairly picayune matters (“during the eighth five-year plan, the total floor-space increased by 3.8m square meters”), and a commitment to internationalism, including a long-ish description of Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, which was where most foreign students went at the time.  There’s also some description of university research activities (which always needed to be tied into economic planning), though since most of the serious research was done in the Academy system, this doesn’t get a lot of space.

What really catches the eye reading this document today are two things: the focus on students and student life, and the focus on “re-training”.  And in both cases the intrigue is at least as much about what the pamphlet omits as what it includes.

The sections on students is fascinating in the sense that a tremendous amount of space is taken up extolling character formation, which – to put it mildly – is not a contemporary concern in western higher education.   It speaks about “moulding a new harmonious individual…in which aesthetic education plays no small role. It develops artistic taste, fosters appreciation of beauty and maturity of judgement.  The more wide-ranging the students’ knowledge of literature, art and music (i.e. works of outstanding writers, artists, composers, art trends, etc.) the better he (sic) is able to form his own judgements about them”.

And yet the purpose of higher education is anything but education for education’s sake.  The document goes to considerable lengths to emphasize how “institutions of higher education (are becoming) more closely related to production”.  Written at the start of the era of mass unemployment in the west, the pamphlet proclaims that “the state guarantees employment to all graduates in their field of training” (that is, after a guaranteed month’s paid holiday after graduation), which sounds great until you realise that these “guaranteed jobs” were often millions of miles from where anyone actually wanted to live (Yakutsk, anyone?   Magadan?  Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky?) and graduates were required to work in this place for a minimum of three years after graduation (“this is his duty to the state which has given him a higher education”).  Unmentioned are the hundreds of thousands of students over the years who gave this whole process a miss and struck out to find work on their own in Moscow, Leningrad, etc.

The other major area of interest is the focus on what we would call adult education.  The big focus here is actually on upgrading of professors’ knowledge and credentials, which are obliquely described (it’s a propaganda document, remember), as not being entirely up-to-snuff.  As a result, the government instituted a process of taking faculty out of the classroom once every five years for a term in order to give them “refresher courses” to keep their skills and knowledge current.  There’s a couple of reasons why this might have seemed like a good idea: one was that professors in Russian universities didn’t do a lot of research (that was largely left to the Academy of Science) and so might not have had “cutting edge skills” in the way profs at research-intensive universities in North America would have.  Another reason was that some profs likely wouldn’t have had what are now considered terminal degrees (this is still pretty common in developing countries with rapidly-growing PSE systems – there isn’t time to train up all the instructors to doctoral level so some teachers start teaching after a Master’s or sometimes even a Bachelor’s degree).

Missing from this story about adult education is what I think is the most amazing aspect of the late-Soviet system; namely the “People’s Universities”(ungated copy of David Lee’s book on the subject here), which I like to think of as MOOCs without computers.  Basically, there was a central agency in Moscow that would design curricula for night courses for working people – on music or art appreciation, themes in literature, automobile repair, etc.  These centrally designed curricula would then be shipped out to “People’s Universities” – in practice, continuing education departments, only grafted awkwardly as external units to real universities rather than being integrated within them – which would decide, based on local demand, which courses to put on each term.  At their height, something like 20 million people would enrol in these courses every term, which is an amazing feat of educational organization, pre-internet.

Anyways, that was the Soviet Union’s higher education system: for a time, among the highest-achieving in the world, with respect to increasing access.  It has taken almost thirty years since the collapse of socialism for the system to regain some sense of stability and dynamism, at least in Russia.  The future of universities there is still – potentially at least – one of the most interesting stories in global higher education.

From Doha, where I will working for the next few days at the College of the North Atlantic, have a great weekend.