Special projects
Red Lines That Aren’t on Any Map: What can and can’t be said at Russian universities
What restrictions now govern the teaching of the humanities at Russian universities? How are they enforced in practice? And how do faculty and students try to get around them? The list of forbidden topics and actions is broadly known and fairly predictable. How these bans actually work, however, only becomes clear through the kind of in-depth conversations with faculty members that T-invariant conducted. Seventeen interviews point to a preliminary conclusion: despite regional, institutional, and disciplinary differences, most of the work of enforcing the new bans is done not by inspectors but by the instructors themselves. In other words, under the new conditions self-censorship has become the main regulatory mechanism, and each instructor monitors and reflects on it in considerable detail.
Access Restricted: What Russia’s Concept for the Development of Mathematics through 2036 chooses not to see
Russian mathematics is losing ground, scientists are leaving, and international ties are fraying — yet the government’s new Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036 presents all of this almost as a force of nature. The number of researchers has “declined,” access to global science has been “restricted,” and the country’s competitive edge is at risk of being “lost.” Who restricted what, where the scientists went, and why Russia is losing influence, the document hardly explains. T-invariant read the Concept and found a striking picture: global mathematics appears in it as something like a warehouse to which access must be “ensured” — preferably along with additional funding.
The Academic Traffic Light. How Russian universities flag “politically unreliable” academics
Research institutes and universities across Russia are keeping blacklists of their own staff. T-invariant has identified two patterns of pressure on scientists and faculty: they are summoned for “conversations” with FSB officers, or they are left without work when an expiring contract is quietly not renewed.
“None of the political parties makes higher education a priority on its agenda”: American higher education through the eyes of a university administrator
Our interviewee today is not allowed to give interviews — under the terms of her employment contract. The senior position she holds at an American university obliges her not to make her political views public and to exercise the utmost caution in public statements. But the changes now taking place at American universities are so far-reaching that she agreed to talk with T-invariant about the serious challenges facing higher education. Her experience as a department chair and dean, and later as a vice president, helps her today to map the critical points in the development of the academic environment: how the new presidential administration is affecting university life, how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has split it, how artificial intelligence is influencing teaching and its administration, what the shrinking of university budgets leads to, and, most importantly, how the very logic by which higher education works has changed.
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