The 85-year-old rector of Moscow State University, Viktor Sadovnichy, was recently reappointed for a seventh term. He has been in office since 1992. This is not a typical situation: today, the average age of a rector is under 60, and it has even decreased somewhat recently. T-invariant has studied the biographies of the heads of Russian universities in detail and realised that the problem with the rector corps is different: it is remarkably monotonous and unremarkable, as if it were specially selected according to an average pattern. From the rector of Moscow State University to the head of an unremarkable regional university that has more references in Dissertation than scientific articles, from “strong businessmen” to “young technocrats”, from “Vikings” to “their own” – all of them have similar biographies and typical careers.
Despite the fact that Russian rectors seem to be constantly in the public eye, little is known about them. The last major study of the rector corps that became public was conducted five years ago by Kryshtanovskaya Lab and the State University of Management. From it we learnt that the average age of a rector in Russia is 59.5 years (by the way, in the early 1980s the average age was only 39), and two thirds of them have made a “scientific” or “scientific-administrative career”. There are almost no surveys of rectors, and in those that have been published, there are not many revelations. For example, in 2020, the rector of Voronezh University, Dmitry Yendovitsky (in June 2024 he was arrested on suspicion of bribery), together with his co-authors , surveyed twenty of his fellow rectors and found that 75% of them suffered from “curtailment” of autonomy and manipulative actions on the part of their superiors. And as of 2022, we don’t even know how much they earn. By presidential decree, “during the period of a special military operation,” rectors’ incomes are as much a state secret as maps of the location of nuclear installations.
T-Invariant’s survey of Russian rectors concerns rectors (including acting rectors and vice rectors) of the first hundred of the country’s leading universities according to the RAEX rating (formerly Expert RA). This sample included a wide range of people: from Sadovnichy to rectors of state universities in the Moscow region, from academics to PhDs with a Hirsch index of 1.
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Own people
It is commonly believed that in the last decade the Russian rector corps has been formed entirely of “Vikings” and other officials who, like aliens on space saucers, descend on the heads of university teams and begin to plague them in every possible way. Indeed, the rectors of the first hundred Russian universities have very different and sometimes dizzying biographies. Among them there is one former governor (Vladimir Miklushevsky, the current rector of Moscow Polytechnic), several officials of the Ministry of Education and Science, several people from conventional “business” (mostly state corporations – for example, Mikhail Pogosyan from UAC, who became rector of MAI, or Vladimir Serebrenny from Rostec structures, who became rector of the Moscow State Technical University “STANKIN”).
There are even eight “serial rectors” among them. For example, the current rector of MIPT, Dmitry Livanov, was once rector of his native MISIS, and the rector of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Nikita Anisimov, was rector of DvFU, where he never worked. By the way, the same FEFU (five rectors have been replaced there in the last 10 years) was also headed by the already mentioned Vladimir Miklushevsky before he became governor of Primorsky Krai and rector of Moscow Polytechnic. Among them, there is the Eurasian Andrei Loginov from the Russian State University of Humanities, and Artem Azhgirevich, rector of MADI, who graduated from a Suvorov school and long ago had his licence revoked by a private university.
Nevertheless, two thirds of the current rectors of the top 100 Russian universities did not fall into their chairs out of nowhere: they moved there from other chairs in the same universities. In 17% of cases, the previous position of the current rectors is “first vice-rector” of the same university, i.e., as a rule, it is a classic successor of the previous rector. In 55 per cent of cases, the current rector worked at the same university. In 71% of cases, these are people from “academia”. And only the remaining third are “aliens”: former officials and heads of business structures.
Moreover, 57% of rectors head the same university where they once studied, and more than half of them head a university in the same region where they were born. And on average, they have worked for almost 25 years at the university they ended up heading. Only 28 people out of 100 came to the university for the first time for their own introduction to the staff as the new rector. The rest had previously worked at the university they were to manage.
In short, in two thirds of cases, these are absolutely “own people” for the university being headed, appointed rectors at the age of 45-50 years. In other words, they are not “Vikings” who are a nightmare for the staff. They were not imposed on universities, but grew up within them.
Unchangeable
Another myth important for the university environment is the story about the change of generations, which replaced the dormant “strong economists” with a generation of “young technocrats”. This also has nothing to do with reality. There are relatively few rectors in Russia over 65, but almost no rectors under 40 (that is, there is only one – acting rector of the Baltic Federal University Maxim Demin). The core of the rectorial staff – people from 40 to 60 years old.
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If we break down our entire list into groups of rectors appointed or elected in different periods (less than five years ago, from 2014 to 2019, since 2000, and 25 years ago or more), we find that there is no difference between them at all. The average age at appointment, the attitude to the university (heading his own alma mater), the average length of service at the university before appointment, even the average Hirsch index (taking into account the length of the academic career) – everything shows that there was and is no “Livanov wave” or “Falkov wave”. The only fundamental difference between the recently appointed rectors (less than five years ago) is their secret connections revealed by the Dissertation and their “family ties” to the university they were appointed to head.
Indeed, while rectors elected or appointed before 2019 in two-thirds of cases were sent to lead the same universities they graduated from, less than half of those who became rectors after 2019 did so. Are there really “young technocrats” after all? Yes and no. Cases of very recent appointments in 2023-2024 provide such a deviation from the “norm”, and each case is unique. Two of the recent appointees (at VAVT and BFU) suddenly became rectors after the arrest of their former head. Natalia Naumova, rector of the State University of Education (former Moscow Regional Pedagogical University), came to lead the university from the Ministry of Education for obvious reasons: the ministry is making it a model propaganda institute. Andrei Loginov’s appointment to RSU is not “technocratic” in any way, but the most political. The appointment of Yevgeny Rumyantsev, the former head of a similar Ivanovo university, as acting rector of the Mendeleev Russian Chemical Technical University, is connected with clan squabbles and election scandals.
The mobility of university leaders is not only not growing, but is falling sharply. While the rectors of the “old formation” (those elected before 2000) only in 20 per cent of cases work in the same region where they were born (Sadovnichy is from Ukraine, and ITMO rector Vladimir Vasiliev is from Stavropol), the “newcomers” in two thirds of cases show themselves to be perfect homebodies.
There can be only one conclusion here: there is no generational change in Russian universities and there never has been. Both the circumstances of election/appointment and the biography/career of rectors elected in the 1990s coincide on average with those who have been appointed to lead universities in recent years.
Contributors to help
Rectors also like to be measured by scientometrics. On average, they are really quite convincing scientists with a Hirsch index (according to RINC) in the region of 20-30 units. As a rule, they are physicists, mathematicians and technicians, but the leading universities in Russia are mostly technical, historically speaking.
However, to seriously evaluate Russian rectors as scientists (and even with the help of scientometrics) is not only a thankless task, but also quite offensive for them. Yes, the 85-year-old Sadovnichy does have a Hirsch Index of 35, but in the last 20 years he has not written a single article on his own: they are all co-authored (unless you take into account the ceremonial speeches and greetings published in the form of articles, where speechwriters were clearly involved).
The example of the leader of the rating by Hirsch index (90!), Rector of Timiryazevka, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Economics and favourite of Dissertnet Vladimir Trukhachev, it is obvious that rectors often lose touch with reality in attributing great scientific achievements to themselves. Probably, almost all of them sinned by attributing to themselves co-authorship “ex officio”, but Trukhachev could not stop in time. As a result, he had 2.2 thousand co-authors, with whom he wrote 43 articles in 2024 alone.
Judging by the published works for this year alone, Trukhachev is a specialist in cattle, mixed fodder, milk, broiler chickens, tractor construction, fertilisers, genetic interrelations of animals, prospects of sheep breeding in Russia and in the world, forest soils, methods of cultivation of winter rye in drought conditions, increasing productivity of laying hens and industrial dairy goat breeding.
And the scientific community highly appreciates his works. In particular, his most outstanding work in recent years – the textbook “Norms and rations of feeding farm animals” – was quoted 4,500 times.
Co-authorship is a well-known disease that afflicts Russian rectors. Thus, according to a study of 55.5 thousand of their articles, more than half of the rectors of Russian universities before their appointment to a high position never had co-authors. And three quarters of them, after their appointment, write articles exclusively in co-authorship. Let us add to this that 22% of the rectors on the list (let us remind you, of the leading Russian universities) are Dissertnet members, including 40% of those who have been heading their universities for more than 25 years. In this sense, the outsider of the rating, Rector of the State University of Russia Natalia Naumova, with a Hirsch Index of 1, looks at least honest with herself: she has 14 articles, seven of which she wrote completely independently.
Effective inefficiency
The main question is the effectiveness of the work of the people on the list (the rest is not so important if the universities are developing steadily and rapidly under their leadership). Efficiency can be assessed in different ways, but the easiest way is by the same ratings. Especially since until recently rectors were explicitly instructed to fight for promotion in them.
If we take the same RAEX rating [1] and compare the university’s position at the time of election/appointment with what has been achieved by 2024 (some in three years, some in 25 years), it turns out that, on average, rectors have provided their universities with literally zero dynamics. That is, half of them managed to improve the university’s position in the rating (usually by a couple of points), while the other half failed to fulfil their mission and their performance only worsened. Paradoxically, this does not depend on the rector’s tenure. On average, both “newcomers” and “old-timers” manage their universities in the same way.
An analysis of international rankings is even more revealing. However, there is a certain difficulty with them. For example, if we take the THE index, it has only since 2016 included a more or less representative sample of Russian universities (i.e. more than three). In addition, after the war in Ukraine started, many Russian universities (including potential leaders like SPbSU) stopped submitting data to THE (nevertheless, for the THE 2025 ranking, its authors managed to collect data from more than a hundred Russian universities).
If we leave for analysis only those universities for which data are available both for the year of appointment/election of the current rector and for 2025 (the ranking was published in October), we will be left with 20 people on the list. Of these, only two (Rector of Tomsk Polytechnic Leonid Sukhikh and Rector of Baumanka Mikhail Gordin) were able to ensure the growth of their institution’s position. The rest of the universities under the leadership of the current rectors are confidently showing negative dynamics.
The effectiveness of the work of rectors outside this list can be conditionally assessed in other time intervals. For example, the current rector of Novosibirsk State University Mikhail Fedoruk headed it in 2012, and in THE rating NSU first appeared in 2016 in the range of 301-350 places. In the 2025 ranking, the same NSU with the same Fedoruk at the head is already in the ninth hundred of the rating.
Flesh from flesh
So, according to our research, the rectors of the first hundred Russian universities are, on average, dubious scientists, ineffective managers, who are at the most active age and manage their home universities, within which they grew up. They are changed places, moved from place to place, put at the head of universities by various ministers, but they do not change at all. What is the merit of keeping all of them in these responsible positions? The answer that comes first of all: for their flexibility, their ability to catch any changes in the rhetoric of their superiors and, at a particular moment, to have exactly such an opinion that coincides with this rhetoric.
For example, in March 2019, Viktor Sadovnichy, speaking at the International Forum “Universities, Society and the Future of Mankind” at Moscow State University, said: “Russia is an integral part of the European educational space”. Among the challenges for Russian higher education he named online learning, artificial intelligence, poor ecology – anything but the intrigues of the insidious West. And in May 2022, hesaid that Russians have “a slightly different mentality”, and therefore the European system of education, in which “everything depends on you,” is not suitable for Russians.
Eduard Galazhinsky, rector of Tomsk State University and vice-president of the Russian Academy of Education, is an equally telling example. In his time, he received the rector’s position as an effective leader of the 5-100 project, defended TSU projects in English before foreign officials, and in 2017, he was even one of the initiators of installing a sculptural composition of the Beatles in front of the main building of the university. And in October 2022, in a large interview with references to numerous scholars and Sergey Pereslegin , he argued that the country is threatened by “the expansion of foreign cultural codes”, and it is “Russian culture that should determine the foundations of all levels of the education system, ensuring its self-sufficiency and primacy”.
Describing Joseph Stalin’s entourage, Osip Mandelstam called it “a rabble of thin-skinned chiefs.” As then, the current “leaders” of Russian higher education did not fall out of nowhere, but grew out of its very depths, thus becoming its embodiment in miniature. This, perhaps, is the biggest problem.
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Text: Sergey Chernyshov
[1] Rectors appointed or elected before 2012 (the first year when the rating was published) and appointed/elected in 2024 were excluded from the list. Thus, 68 persons remained on the list. If a university was not in the top 100 of the rating at the time of appointment/election, its position was conventionally considered as 101st.
Sergey Chernyshov 5.12.2024