The Sources of Academic Power in Russian Universities

Distribution of power within academic organizations is one of the classical themes in the sociology of higher education (Balrdidge, 1970; Clark and Youn, 1976; Kaplan, 2006; Enders and Musselin, 2008; Jones, 2011; Apkarian et al 2014). A variety of theories seeks to explain the sources of influence of various groups. This study extends the existing debate by adding one more variable – polyarchy – understood as the state in which multiple agents have access to policy formation in each sphere. We argue that the tendency to share spheres of control is an intervening variable standing between structural characters of a university and the political regime existing in it. The analysis is based on a survey study on Russian university politics which was carried out in 2006. It is a survey of higher administrators (rectors or vice-rectors) of 501 Russian universities (carried out within annual “Monitoring of Educational Markets and Organizations” survey by Russian Higher School of Economics). This survey includes questions on influence of various groups on different issues in university politics similar to ones reported in earlier studies (Goedegebuure and Boer 1996; Kaplan and Norton, 2004) as well as on many other characters of the universities (economy, list of programmes offered, etc.), thus making it possibly the richest source of data for testing various hypotheses of sources of the academic power. Moreover, the characters of the Russian higher education allow to estimate the effects of variables scarcely captured in earlier comparative analysis, such as effects of different constitutions (in 2006 in Russian public universities rectors and deans were elected by vote of the personnel, while in most private universities they were appointed by the trustees). The respondents were asked to specify who of the nine agents (trustees, rectors, university and faculty councils, deans, unions, academics and students) had influence over which of six spheres of university politics (budget, admissions, personnel, investment, education programmes, research). For the further analysis the mentions of powers for each agent were summed. Then, a set of Poisson regression models were estimated to predict it. Independent variables are: is university private or state, is it a branch or a central campus, log age of institution, its size (measured as the log number of academics), research activity (measured as the percentage of academics who had publications during the last two years), Herfindalh index for economy diversification and polyarchy. The polyarchy dimension was constructed as the sum of all agents’ powers in a given university. Polyarchy turns out to be the most significant predictor for all agents. One may suggest that polyarchy is a variable characterizing a surveyed subjects’ predisposition to recognize power relations around herself (Enz, 1989), rather than any traits of an organization’s political regime. However, our results demonstrate that polyarchy has significant structural predictors. Factor playing the greatest role is faculty’s involvement in research activity. This effect has more to do with a research culture influencing readiness to participate in a university’s affairs. If this interpretation is correct, organizational approach seems to be the most powerful in explaining academic power in Russian universities.