The Higher School of Economics building in Moscow. Courtesy of the university’s Facebook page
The Higher School of Economics is stripping DOXA of its status as a student organization. This means we will no longer be able to work there
https://doxajournal.ru/hse_doxa
Our sources have informed us that right now the Council of the Student Initiatives Support Fund is voting to strip our journal of its status as a student organization. This would mean we would no longer be able to work at the Higher School of Economics (HSE). According to our information, Yaroslav Kuzminov, the rector of HSE, has already voted to remove the status.
The council is voting on whether to ban our work at HSE at the behest of Natalya Pochinok, rector of the Russian State Social University (RGSU). She complained about an article in DOXA about her career as rector. Pochinok claimed the article discredited the university’s professional reputation and harmed cooperation between the two universities. And yet neither Ms. Pochinok nor the council have contacted us.
Consequently, the university’s legal office compiled a detailed report in which it claimed that many of the articles published in DOXA had, allegedly, damaged the university’s professional reputation. The following articles [in Russian] were mentioned:
- “Five Good Reasons Not to Apply to HSE”
- “RGSU’s Candidate for the Moscow City Duma: ‘It’s Wrong to Expect Full Tuition from the State'”
Other articles published in DOXA were mentioned in an accompanying letter to the council, recommending it vote to exclude us from HSE. The HSE employee who wrote the letter found “signs of political activism” in them.
- “A Who’s Who of Bad Rectors”
- “The University in a Hole”
- “The Cold Summer of 2019”
- “We Could Be Facing a New Bolotnaya Square Case”
Our journal was founded on the idea that self-criticism and public debate are an essential element of university life. The revocation of our status as a student organization deprives HSE’s students and instructors of a feedback channel and representation in the public space.
The news of the attempt to deprive us of our status as a student organization came as a complete surprise to us. HSE is the university where our journal was born and evolved: we have always considered it our alma mater. We ask for and count on support from the journalistic and academic communities. For almost three years, we have advanced the idea of academic and civic solidarity. We hope that our work in this area has not been meaningless.
Besides, we do not believe our work has harmed HSE’s reputation. On the contrary, we have even shown it is one of the few Russian universities that is not afraid of open, public discussion. Therefore, we demand from HSE’s administration the same open discussion about the closure of our organization. We would argue that, otherwise, the damage to the university’s reputation will be much greater than from any of our articles.
The Editorial Board of DOXA
Contact us by email (doxa.fgn@gmail.com), telephone (+7 915 076 2181) or Telegram bot if you would like to make a comment or suggestion or discuss something with us.
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Greg Yudin
Facebook
December 4, 2019
All twenty years I’ve had the chance to observe the Higher School of Economics, the same thing keeps happening there. The university really wants to be like the big boys and knows that the big boys have this thing called student self-government. The university, therefore, makes huge, sincere efforts to develop and support it.
You will be surprised, but then it turns out that student government wants to govern. Meaning that it has its own, profoundly incompetent and infantile viewpoint on the university’s development. After that, the university declares this was not what it had in mind and either tells the student government to go to hell or turns it into a Komsomol-like organization.
If memory serves, this is a least the third time things have followed this same scenario. The only difference is that DOXA is, of course, several cuts above all the previous student projects that emerged at HSE. It is a project of national importance that literally from scratch has in a short time made the Russian student body a subject. It has obviously begun to have an impact on the situation in Moscow and has the potential of putting the problems that really concern Russian university students on the national agenda.
I cannot say, by the way, that I have no issues with DOXA and that it is flawless. (It would be odd if such a breakthrough project were perfect from the get-go.) In my experience, DOXA is staffed by quite modest, reflective and constructive people who are well aware that they can be wrong.
But to close a powerful student project on the basis of a denunciation from the rector of RGSU, a plagiarizer and dealer in dissertations and diplomas, a weak, incompetent politician, and to report it in official documents? There is no force in Russia strong enough to force HSE to whip its own students in front of the RGSU rector. This is an internal decision, and its style (“damage to the university’s professional reputation”) is quite telltale.
We can imagine what would happen if, say, the rector of Columbia University asked the Stanford administration to close the Stanford student newspaper. Until the HSE administration understands that student self-government inevitably involves unpleasant people who have a different point of view than theirs on the university’s development and with whom they have to be able to negotiate, it won’t become a normal university.
What separates HSE from RGSU is the fact that DOXA emerged and evolved there, not the number of published articles, not quartiles, and not citation indices. Because students who really support the university are a major, long-term resource, and the statements made yesterday by all the major student organizations in support of DOXA bear this out, while you can always buy articles, at the end of the day. Ask the RGSU rector about it: she has an impeccable professional reputation in the business.
Translated by the Russian Reader
The Russian Reader 