LINKING DIGNIFIED STATUS OF FACULTY TO THE IMPLEMENTATION OF REFORMS AT THE TECHNICAL CORE OF UKRAINE’S UNIVERSITIES

The CIS and former-socialist ministries of education that signed for the Bologna Process (BP) of university reform did so without thinking deeply about the implications of what they had done. Some ministries signed for political or symbolic reasons [1], and most assumed that the BP requirements could be implemented with simple bureaucratic measures [2].

The main conceptual shortcoming of former-socialist policymakers is that they have not sufficiently reflected upon the legitimizing premises of the Soviet regime and educational system, and have uncritically maintained bureaucratic habits that are inappropriate under conditions of national independence and globalization. Policymakers have also greatly underestimated the depth of cultural and institutional changes that are necessary, especially at the technical core (see below) of universities.

The first purpose of this paper is to illuminate briefly the political and legitimizing basis of Soviet education, for on this basis crucial assumptions were made about human nature and institutional organization. The second purpose is to show how institutional functioning can be changed according to new assumptions.

Conceptual Premises of Education Policies – Past and Future

The straightforward but essential point to grasp is that the USSR was an empire, whose government’s main concern was to control territories and peoples. To this end the content and methods of education were strictly controlled through an elaborate ideological apparatus. The government considered this apparatus necessary lest people engage in social criticism and entertain thoughts of territorial separatism, as in fact occurred in 1917-1918 and in 1989-1991. That is, the legitimacy of the regime was not based on popular consent; people could not be trusted to manage their local affairs; and human nature was considered to be fundamentally bad. These features required an authoritarian pedagogy and detailed bureaucratic controls. In this, the education system never had a social development aspect [3, p. 52].

Ukraine’s national independence, based on a free referendum and civic accord, changes completely what is possible in education system functioning; while the requirements of modernization and challenges of globalization change what is necessary. Pedagogically, this means that people do not need to be guarded from their own intellects; governmentally, this means that academic communities and university faculty not only can, but must, be allowed to manage the local institutions that are closest to them. The latter proposition follows from the fact that state bureaucracies cannot micro-manage universities effectively, and that knowledge is “socially distributed” [4] and cannot be comprehended or “codified” [5] by slow-moving ministries of education. This was always well understood in Western countries, where universities are considered to be “community trusts” and enjoy full academic and intra-institutional freedom.

University Autonomy and Dignified Status for Faculty

On the institutional level the main shortcomings of the post-socialist ministries of education are that these ministries have not granted autonomy over internal operations to universities and have not accorded the status of a “dignified profession” to faculty. Thus universities remain controlled in detailed and inappropriate things like hiring and promotion of faculty, in the kinds of programs and courses they must teach, and even the student assessment criteria that faculty use. Faculty remain overworked and underpaid; they must teach classes that are larger and are expected now to conduct research (which is necessary) and to publish, even though they have insufficient time and incentives for these activities. By their nature and choice of profession, faculty are idealists and would like to serve their students and institutions well [see 6], but are constrained by practices and rules that have not pedagogical rationales but remain in place from the previous political regime because of habit. The result is that faculty have either not wanted or, more often, have not been able to implement the detailed reform directives sent down by ministries of education because of lack of time and cross-pressures [7]. Consequently, elite-initiated policy changes have not achieved penetration into the technical core (the classrooms and research libraries) where the basic work of universities is done.

The key people at the technical core are the department-level faculty. It is faculty who understand best the needs and abilities of their students, and understand best the latest knowledge in their disciplines. Obviously education reforms cannot proceed effectively without the willing participation of faculty; and effective partnerships among civic communities, universities, and ministries of education will not occur without an empowered and motivated faculty. A key aspect of faculty empowerment and motivation is to accord it the status of a dignified profession.

Five conditions are necessary for dignified status [8, p. 181-2]:

• The profession should be full time. This implies adequate financial security for the individual.

• The profession should have training schools within a university setting. This affirms that its members have special knowledge and competencies not possessed by others, and that state agencies defer to this knowledge and these competencies.

• The profession should have its own association or union, for its members’ defense and advancement of their interests. This enables practitioners to obtain social and political allies, and to work for their own benefit while also benefitting the broader society.

• The profession should have legal protection, including the right to set its own standards of competence and to exclude outsiders who do not meet these standards. Accordingly, a state agency does not interfere into substance of the profession’s functioning.

• The profession should have a code of ethics, by which the profession is licensed to regulate and police the behaviour of its members. Consequently a state agency does not conduct the disciplining of the profession’s members.

The converse of these points is an impoverished and powerless faculty; but such a faculty cannot serve its society well.

An Example of University Autonomy and Dignified Status in Action

The premises that people are competent, seek responsibility, and can be trusted, and that autonomous universities should possess a dignified faculty, were applied to good effect within the author’s home institution, KIMEP University (KU), in Almaty. Since its inception in 1992, KU has operated along the principles of a Western liberal arts institution, being transparent to inside and outside stakeholders. KU followed international pedagogical methods and content in its academic programs; hired and remunerated faculty as it saw fit; and left it to faculty professionals to design and teach courses, and to keep up with the latest advances in their disciplines and to create new knowledge through research. At the same time, KU meets the BP requirements and has recently received full program and institutional accreditation by international agencies.

The most remarkable thing about these accomplishments is that they have been essentially unproblematic. To be sure, these accomplishments required considerable effort by all faculty and staff; but another remarkable thing is how forthcoming this effort was. The ministry of education or university upper management were not the initiators of quality improvements and efforts towards accreditation, for the faculty themselves perceived the need for these. Still, faculty goodwill aside, certain sound practices of practical organization needed to be followed.

First, upper management understood that for accreditation requirements to be implemented, some “slack” or released capacity within the organization was necessary. Thus a dean and several particularly interested faculty members, who were deployed to do the overseeing and coordinating of reforms, were given reduced teaching loads and relief from other duties. But beyond providing the resources for redeployment and incidental administrative costs, upper management mostly stood aside from the reform process.

The dean was widely respected and chosen by the consensus of the faculty and management. It is important to note that the dean, as such, held only an intermediate-level position within the university; accordingly he was close enough to the technical core to understand students, curricula, and faculty, but was also ranked highly enough to have access to, and to inform, upper management. In his position the dean was able to mediate vertically among the higher and lower levels of the university, as well as horizontally among departments and colleges. Thus, upper management deployed a realistic amount of resources to support reforms; while at the same time the coordination and forward movement of reforms were not left to drift, but were vested with a specific and highly motivated individual, who worked with others similarly motivated and unencumbered by excessive duties.

The dean’s style was not of a boss, but a coach and listener. Faculty who were afraid that they might be at a disadvantage under the reforms were given the opportunity to re-profile or upgrade their qualifications, or were given the funding and time to conduct research, if a greater research output was to be expected of them. That is, one important principle was that no one should be hurt by the reforms; and because of this principle internal resistance was avoided. Because a willing constituency for reforms was created inside the technical core, administrative pressure from above – which would have failed anyway – was not required.

In sum, KU’s experience highlights several features that are necessary for internal university governance and reform implementation. Most generally, an “open systems” and democratic model of governance is required, in which personnel of a dignified profession are assumed to be intelligent, wanting to take on responsibilities, and capable of being trusted. However, major institutional defects in BP reform implementation in the former-socialist countries have been the lack of autonomy for universities and the lack of academic freedom and dignified status for faculty. These defects are premised on a mean view of human nature characteristic in an elite-governed and illegitimate state. But since Ukraine’s statehood is now based on popular consensus, inappropriate habits and structures of rule can and should be discarded and replaced by modern and effective ones.

1. Soltys, D. (2013) “Progress in Implementing Bologna: Tendencies and Implications,” in John Dixon and Dennis Soltys, eds., Implementing Bologna in Kazakhstan: A Guide for Universities (Almaty: Academpress). Available at: http://www.academia.edu/3741936/Implementing_Bologna_in_Kazakhstan_A_Guide_for_Universities.

2. Caddick, S. (2008) “Back to Bologna. The Long Road to European Higher Education Reform,” EMBO Report, 9 (1), 18-21. Retrieved from www.ncbi/nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2246620.

3. Tomusk, V. (2011) “The Geography and Geometry of the Bologna Process: Central Asian Higher Education in the New Global Periphery,” in Silova, I. (ed.), Globalization on the Margins: Education and Postsocialist Transformations in Central Asia (Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age Publishing).

4. Gibbons, M. (1998) Speech Delivered at the World Conference on Higher Education, UNESCO, Paris, October.

5. Bloom, D. (2005) “Raising the Pressure: Globalization and the Need for Higher Education Reform,” in Glen A. Jones, Patricia L. McCarney, and Michael Skolnik, eds., Creating Knowledge, Strengthening Nations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

6. Rumyantseva, N. and T. Caboni (2012) “Are Academics in Kazakhstan Capable of Self-Regulation? A Study of Faculty’s Normative Structures in the Midst of Higher Education Decentralization Reforms,” Tertiary Education and Management, Vol. 1.

7. Shaw, M., D. Chapman, and N. Rumyantseva (2011) “The impact of the Bologna Process on academic staff in Ukraine,” Higher Education Management and Policy, Vol. 23, No. 3, 71-91, OECD. Filatreau, S. (2011) “Ukraine’s Participation in the Bologna Process: Has it Resulted in More Transparency in Ukrainian Higher Education Institutions?” International Research and Review: Journal of Phi Beta Honor Society of International Scholars, Vol. 1 No. 1.

8. Harris-Van Keuren, C. (2011) “Influencing the status of teaching in Central Asia,” in Silova, op. cit.