I’m on my way to Moscow today.  It’s become one of my favourite destinations not only because I can walk around and pretend I am in my favourite novels (I highly recommend an early morning stroll to the Patriarch Ponds and then sit on one of the benches to read the opening chapter of The Master and Margarita) but also because Russia in general holds a mirror up to the west and makes you question the “normal” order of things.  Like, for instance, the organization of science.

In the west, there is a standard history of the organization of science since the middle ages.  Although universities were relatively widespread across Europe from the fourteenth-century onwards, it wasn’t until a couple of hundred years later that experimental sciences popped up and – for the most part – did so outside the university system.   Copernicus, Brahe and Kepler, for instance, all did their work outside universities, as did Robert Boyle in England.  To keep abreast of scientific developments, scientists would congregate in learned societies such as the Royal Society, many of which later became Academies of Sciences.  Even well into the eighteenth century, it was not yet clear whether scientific laboratories would in the long run function independently, through societies, or as part of universities.

The bridge between universities and sciences was Mathematics, which was mostly in universities by this point because it was, at that point, mostly a branch of philosophy.  By the start of the nineteenth century universities had “won” the battle for sciences, albeit at a price: universities had to accept the notion that they would be organized along disciplinary lines – which, given the way disciplines complicate university structure, was in fact a pretty significant concession (a good sketch of this process can be found in Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton’s Reinventing Knowledge From Alexandria to the Internet).  And so it has been ever since, not just in the west but in all those developing countries which inherited their universities from their former colonizers.

The big exception, though, was Russia.  The Russian Empire didn’t have a university until the mid-eighteenth century; however, thanks to Peter the Great’s modernization drive, it did have an academy from 1725 onwards (albeit one mostly staffed by Germans).  That gave the Academy a huge head-start in the race to organize science, one which it maintained more or less right through to the Revolution.  Whereas in the west Academies had mostly turned into national honour societies, in late tsarist Russia they remained a major scientific organizing force. 

By the time the 1920s came around, a third form of scientific organization had appeared: that of the independent institute.  The point of these in most countries in most countries was to insulate pure research from the horrors of having to teach ever-growing numbers of undergraduates; hence the Pasteur Institute in France and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute – later the Max Planck Institute – in Germany (Rockefeller University in New York was born out of similar concerns).  In Russia, institutes also proliferated at the same time but, as Loren Graham points out in his excellent Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, the motivation was the opposite: to insulate the huge but impressionable new wave of proletarian university students from the habits and prejudices of bourgeois professors.  But whereas in the west these institutes tended to be either independent or under the wing of universities, in the Soviet Union they fell under the Academy of Sciences if they were related to basic research or under individual production ministries if they had a more applied focus.  Universities did not really get a look in.

Now, although there were significant differences between the organization of western and Soviet science, one thing remained constant: namely, the hierarchy prestige within Science.  Basic sciences were the king, applied sciences were at the bottom of the heap.  Partly, that reflected the fact that Russian science tended to be better at the theoretical stuff (or as they sometimes called it, the “blackboard disciplines”, meaning those where the required equipment was no more  complicated than a blackboard and chalk), which in turn was a reflection of the fact that Russia’s economic situation has always made it difficult to be at the forefront of disciplines with heavier equipment requirements.  But mostly it was just pure academic snobbery, and the pure sciences enforced it rigorously, making sure they monopolized the highly sought-after title of “academician” (a more prestigious position than a mere “professor”).  That this happened in a system where science was supposed to be at the practical service of the proletariat made the dominance of the basic scientists and theoreticians all the more surprising.

The Russians had a chance to change all this in 1991 when the USSR disappeared and the Soviet Academy was replaced by a Russian one.  There were serious proposals on the table to adopt a more western-style system, where science took place mostly in universities, or at the very least to give research institutes more independence from the Academy.  But the privileges that went along with academy membership were too great and reform proposals were voted down.  And though attempts have been made since to strengthen university-based science (through the 5-100 Academic Excellence Project, for example), without revisiting the fateful decisions of 1991 the likelihood of major advances remains small.

There are a couple of lessons to be taken from this little sojourn through Russian history.  One is simply that there was nothing inevitable about the marriage of science and universities: they have been separate before and it’s not impossible to imagine they could be again.  The second is the importance of path dependence: local historical circumstances in the organization of science and learning three centuries ago still have very strong repercussions even today.  And the third is the absolute freaking imperviousness of scientific prestige hierarchies to all historical, economic and organizational contingencies.  Among scientists, basic is best and seemingly nothing can move them on this point.Udachnava dnya.