Five Questions for the Rector

Nikita Anisimov, Rector of HSE University

© HSE University

Forbes Russia Education talked to HSE University’s new Rector, Nikita Anisimov, about the key difficulties and challenges facing the university, areas of future development, the unique culture of Russian universities and whether a change of administration impacts it, whether universities should change in response to the times, the importance of internationalization and its use to students. HSE News Service offers a translation of the interview.

In the US, each university has its own culture that has formed throughout its history. You have served in top executive positions at many Russian universities: Lomonosov MSU, MAMI, Far Eastern Federal University, and now HSE University. Do you believe Russian universities also have a unique culture?

Let’s start with history. Russian higher education has a rich and diverse history. The Russian Empire had imperial universities, about a dozen of them. They had their own culture, which remains to this day. For example, if you go to Moscow University or Tomsk University, you will be surprised to find that they are similar in terms of culture, since both used to be imperial universities.

The Soviet period was an era of industrialization that gave birth to universities that we call ‘industry’ universities today. If you go, for example, to the Pacific Medical University in Vladivostok and the Northern Medical University in Arkhangelsk, you will be surprised to see that the atmosphere in both is very similar. This is because industrial universities were meant to keep people in their home regions, encouraging them to get a degree and work as local professionals. This is how the next layer of university culture evolved in our country.

In the early 1990s, a cohort of new universities evolved. Among them was HSE University. In this respect, HSE University is the same age as the new Russia. It is a university that, as with the birth of our country, has absorbed the spirit of freedom, creativity, expectation, collaboration, international cooperation, transparency, intolerance of deceit and much more

Of course, the university has grown a lot since then, and today, it boasts 50,000 students, 10,000 employees, a large academic core, and diverse areas of studies. For example, the Faculty of World Economy and International Relations is close in spirit to MGIMO, the cradle of Russian diplomacy, while the atmosphere at the Faculty of Communications, Media and Design, which will soon be renamed the Faculty of Creative Industries is closer to creative universities (editor’s note: the Faculty of Communications, Media and Design was renamed the Faculty of Creative Industries by decision of the Academic Council as of December 17, 2021). If we look at the Faculty of Mathematics, it has an academic spirit similar to that of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at MSU, my alma mater. I feel honoured, satisfied and a bit sad that HSE University is already ahead of the MSU Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics in several mathematics rankings, but this is a natural process.

This is a melting pot of university cultures united by a common core of freedom—the freedom of academic research and knowledge that fills HSE University. This is the foundation we are proud of

Under Yaroslav Kuzminov (editor’s note: HSE University Rector from 1994–2021) an atmosphere of freedom evolved at the university. Are you going to preserve this culture or do you believe that the times call for a change?

It is very dangerous to think that a university’s atmosphere is about specific personalities who are part of the university, whether they are executives, opinion leaders, influencers or someone else. Universities existed before us and will remain after us. That’s why the atmosphere and the culture of relations are something created by the university itself.

One of my tutors, the late Vladimir Mironov, Dean of the MSU Faculty of Philosophy, told me that universities are smart, self-regulating entities—it makes no sense to try to influence them, because the smarter the people at the university, the more confident they are about resisting change and preserving their internal culture. That’s why no matter who heads the university or who is close to the top, the important thing is the people at the university and the values they share.

HSE University will always share the values it absorbed during its creation and developed throughout its existence.

How do you believe universities should change in order to comply with the demands of the present?

We are used to higher education referring to the abovementioned imperial universities—something fundamental, an ivory tower. Of course, this is no longer true.

I believe that the main task of the higher education system is to maintain speed and treat your activities as a product: to listen to the market and your customers, to be able to configure your programme from blocks. It is common for demand for educational content to relate not to a whole block, but to certain subsets.

Universities are going online with so-called microdegrees, specific modules offered separately from a university degree that anyone in the world can pay for and access. Universities are making this a business

In these terms, a university’s ability to treat what it does as a product and a service is very important. As we put together our new development programme, we of course see that what a university does must be a process that is comprehensible from the outside—a separable product, but a full-cycle product. This approach produces not only fundamental research, but also research that has a specific outcome, production and manufacturing. This is when the university really becomes part of real life.

A high-speed, full-cycle, multidisciplinary approach that is clear to wider society should be the key focus of university life today. These qualities relate to the three key changes to be implemented by HSE University as well.

What will this mean in practice? What are you going to do at HSE University to implement these three qualities?

In our new strategic development programme as part of the ‘Priority 2030’ project (editor’s note: a state programme of Russian higher education development), we have also declared that the university will consolidate its activities around big multidisciplinary, full-cycle, human-oriented projects.

We will study people and their sustainability in our rapidly changing world, carry out research in urban studies, and engage in foresight studies in science and technology, as well as society and economics. These areas don’t resemble conventional ones such as mathematics, physics, chemistry or economics. These are polydisciplinary projects, and each of them has not only a research foundation and comprehensible content, but also applications in the real economy.

Any decision related to what human life will look like tomorrow considerably impacts the economy of the future. Universities like HSE, ones with serious research capital, are part of the international agenda, and can present advanced research that involves not only teachers and researchers, but also students. One key idea behind our reforms is that HSE University is becoming not only a global research university, but a project-based university, where each student is involved in a project related to real life.

We are launching new study tracks. In the near future—by the time this interview is published—we will host a major presentation about our Film Institute (editor’s note: the HSE Film Institute presentation took place on November 22, 2021). HSE University is expecting a lot of new things

You have mentioned the university’s international activities a few times. Universities involved in Project 5-100, which recently came to an end, were tasked with getting into international rankings. The ‘Priority 2030’ programme does not include such a task. Why is internationalization so important for HSE University and what advantages does it provide to its students?

You’ve mentioned the word ‘task’ twice in your questions. I feel sorry for universities that live to fulfil tasks. It is important for a university to have a mission. It is important to follow the mission you were created for, to exist for students and for people overall. Internationalization is part of our mission.

Since its earliest days, the university has been part of the international academic community. At that time, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, HSE University was building international collaboration in order to become an equal participant in the international research community. And today, 30 years later, I can confidently say that it has succeeded.

We not only know the rules of international research, we are able to start shaping these rules, share them with the whole country, demonstrate priority areas of research, and stand at the latest frontiers and forecast them.

International cooperation at faculty level—not only rector to rector or dean to dean—is a key principle of academic interaction all over the world. Creating international research teams that offer not just student exchange, but student interaction as part of the research agenda is a form of international collaboration that any university appreciates.

Let’s look at, for example, the ESG agenda. It has not yet become an active part of academic and applied research in our country, but it comes up more and more often internationally in very distinguished assemblies. Our studies show that a significant proportion of young people make economic decisions—whether or not to buy a certain product—based on non-material reasons, including ESG. This means that we cannot ignore the international agenda in this field, and it is very quickly entering the research scope of HSE University.

Any international cooperation must be, first of all, in the interest of developing our university and higher education in Russia. That’s why the aspect you’ve mentioned—the rankings going from being a key goal to being discontinued—simply demonstrates the growing independence of higher education in our country, the culture of higher education in Russia.

HSE University is among the world’s top 100 universities in several fields. This was not a task, it is a result of the natural evolution of international laboratories at the university. These laboratories attract top international teachers and researchers recruited on the international market under international rules. We pay them competitive salaries and they live in attractive cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. That is what the university’s integration into the international agenda means.

What are the main difficulties and challenges facing the university, in your opinion?

I am a graduate of Moscow University and I worked in its academic environment for a long time. I remember the evolution of HSE University as an external observer, when it was a young, ambitious and dynamic university, developing very fast and confidently forming new and unexpected areas of study. Fifteen years later, I am now observing it as Rector.

I feel that the main risk to HSE University today would be to grow complacent after becoming a major academic centre, a truly multidisciplinary university. It is comparable to Moscow University in size, has started to exceed MSU in rankings, and has lots of collaborations with Moscow and St. Petersburg universities.

I believe that there is a risk when a university feels that it has achieved a lot and is afraid to lose it

If the university loses its ability to take risks, if it loses the ability to make mistakes in pursuit of victory, I believe that it will lose the spirit we felt in Russia during the 1990s, when we knew that everything would get better.

What can be done to prevent this?

First, the university needs its culture, a culture of continuous change. Second, we must believe in this culture.