A student walks down the hallway of a university building and, in a stroke of luck, finds a 1,000-ruble bill lying on the floor. As he bends down to grab it, an idea crosses his mind.
“That is going to be just enough to pay for my exam!” he exclaims.
Then the figure of a man in a suit blocks the light over the squatting student.
“No it won’t!” the man says, shaking his head.
In the next moment, the student is literally kicked out of the university, his official file flying down the stairs behind him.
This bit of melodrama is not an exam-time nightmare, but a video by students at Kazan State University. They are part of an unusual campaign to stamp out corruption on the campus. Too many students and professors have a “pay to play” mentality, reformers say, in which grades and test scores are bought and sold.
Anticorruption videos are shown daily. Students participate in classroom discussions about the problem. Kazan State’s rector, Myakzyum Salakhov, has installed video cameras in every hallway and classroom, so that the security department can watch students and professors in every corner of the university to catch any bribes as they are made.
“Our job is to change the attitude to corruption at our university, so all students and professors realize that corruption is damaging our system of education, that corruption should be punished,” says Mr. Salakhov, who is outspoken, both on campus and off, about the challenges that Russian higher education faces on this front.
“We are working on creating a new trend on our campus,” he says. “Soon every student giving bribes or professor making money on students will feel ashamed.”
Across Russia, bribery and influence-peddling are rife within academe. Critics cite a combination of factors: Poor salaries lead some professors to pocket bribes in order to make ends meet. Students and their families feel they must pay administrators to get into good universities, if only because everyone else seems to be doing it. And local government officials turn a blind eye, sometimes because they, too, are corrupt.
“Corruption has become a systemic problem, and we therefore need a systemic response to deal with it,” Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, said last June.
Last fall a federal law-enforcement operation called Education 2009 reported that law-enforcement officials had uncovered 3,117 instances of corruption in higher education; of those, 1,143 involved bribes. That is a 90-percent increase over the previous year. Law-enforcement agencies prosecuted 265 university employees for taking bribes.
But while many Russians shrug their shoulders over this news—reports on corruption in higher education are hardly new—Kazan State decided to do something about it.
The 200-year-old institution in southwestern Russia, which educated Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Lenin, among others, is considered among the best universities in Russia. It enrolls 14,000 full-time students, most of whom come from the nearby Volga River region of the country.
Grades for Sale
Students and administrators alike say that bribery is rampant on the campus, and that it includes everyone from students to department chairs.
“Corruption is just a routine we have to deal with,” says Alsu Bariyeva, a student activist and journalism major who joined the campaign after a professor in the physical-culture department suggested that she pay him to get credit for her work that semester. She paid.
Several students said they once saw a list of prices posted in the hallway of the law department. The cost of a good grade on various exams ranged from $50 to $200. Students from other departments report similar scenarios.
Many people on the campus identify the arrest last March of the head of the general-mathematics department as a turning point. Police, tipped off by students and parents, charged in and arrested Maryan Matveichuk, 61, as he was pocketing thousands of rubles from a student for a good mark on a summer exam.
The police investigation concluded that in at least six instances Mr. Matveichuk, a respected professor, had accepted bribes of 4,000 to 6,000 rubbles, or about $135 to $200, from students in other departments for good grades on their math exams and courses.
Last September a court in Kazan found the math professor guilty of accepting a total of 29,500 rubles, or $1,000, in bribes, issued a suspended sentence of three years in prison, and stripped him of his teaching credential.
Mr. Matveichuk’s arrest inspired Mr. Salakhov, the rector, to form an anticorruption committee, including administrators and students.
“I personally believe that corruption sits in our mentality,” Mr. Salakhov says. “With students’ help, I found three professors taking bribes and asked them to leave. The committee’s job is to crack down on corruption within these walls.”
Constant Surveillance
Mr. Salakhov’s right-hand man in his fight against corruption is Gennady Sadrislamov, the deputy rector responsible for campus security. A large computer screen on his desk displays images from the cameras placed around the campus.
A former police colonel whose heavy figure appears in the campus anticorruption videos, Mr. Sadrislamov says students are crucial to the campaign’s success.
“Matveichuk brought shame to our university, but unfortunately, he was not the only one making money on the side,” the deputy rector says. “Corruption sits in everybody’s head. We cannot eliminate the idea of bribing and cheating without students’ help.”
With information provided by students and professors, Mr. Sadrislamov goes to the rector to get investigations under way. At least one professor volunteered to quit after he was confronted by Kazan State’s anticorruption council, which comprises the rector, his deputies, the security department, and some students. The group meets monthly to discuss the anticorruption campaign.
The security chief says it will take awhile to rid the campus of corruption, because it is so ingrained.
“I do not believe that professors commit crime because of their low salaries,” he says. “They take bribes because it has gone unpunished. That is the real picture in every Russian university all across the country.”
Russian professors’ salaries are very low. At Kazan State, they make 20,000 to 25,000 rubles a month, or about $667 to $833.
“That is not enough to feed the family. People break the law out of need—they have no option,” says one professor at the university, who did not want his name to be used.
Students have mixed views about the corruption campaign. In a conversation among a group of students from the law department, considered to be among the most corrupt, many scoffed at talk of reform.
“Law-enforcement agencies should reform first,” said one student, who declined to give his name but said he was the son of an agent in the Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the KGB. “Russia is rotten of corruption. Even the president admits that. I do not believe somebody could put the end to it on our campus.”
The reformers seem undeterred by such skepticism.
“Some say we are too naïve to believe that the old traditions can be changed; some avoid even talking to us. But there are students who agree the disease can be treated,” says Dmitry Modestov, a third-year student who works with classmates on developing pens, fliers, and other materials with anticorruption slogans.
“We are trying to change the mind-set on our campus. We say, Knowledge is worth more than bribes.”
A Reform Effort Backfires
Efforts to combat corruption on a national scale have so far failed to have much of an effect.
In 2001, Russia introduced an SAT-like test known as the Unified State Exam. It was created in large measure to eliminate corruption in the college-entrance process. Colleges were to rely primarily on exam results in determining who should be admitted. Last year was the first in which testing became obligatory nationally.
But instead of reducing corruption, the exam apparently has fostered it. Claims arose that exam results were being tampered with by local officials whose job it is to administer the test.
Another avenue of abuse is the so-called “discount” for students with special needs and children of state employees.
Universities are obliged to accept lower scores on the Unified State Exam from members of those groups, which comprise 153 categories, including handicapped students, children of Chernobyl victims, and orphans.
The fixed price for obtaining the needed papers to be labeled as a member of a discount group is 70,000 rubles, or $2,300, says Deliara Yafizova, a first-year student at Kazan State.
“I entered without a bribe, but I heard that there was a price for making life easier,” she said one recent morning in the campus cafe.
Mr. Salakhov, the rector, saw the problem firsthand when he looked at the applicants for this year’s first-year class. “All of a sudden we had crowds of handicapped students applying to our university,” he says. “At one department I had 36 handicapped students per 30 available seats. We tried to check every case, especially the cases where it said that the disability expired in two to three months. Many of these disabled children turned out to have parents working as hospital managers. Their papers turned out fake.”
Of the 1,358 full-time students admitted to Kazan State this academic year, more than 250 were from discount categories.
“That is a tiny little opportunity for universities to stay corrupt,” says Mr. Salakhov. “If a big bureaucrat from, say, the ministry of education sends his son with a letter of support to a rector, the university might have to admit that son. But not at this university. We do not let in students with just any score, no matter how high-rank their parents are.”
As for reporting scores themselves, state-exam corruption has taken on absurd proportions, driven by regional bureaucrats’ desire to ensure that the scores of students admitted to local colleges are better than average.
For example, students in Kabardino-Balkaria and Ingushetia, areas of economic hardship and low-level insurgency near Chechnya, achieved record scores last summer in the Russian-language exam. Yet Russian is not the native language of most residents there.
In another instance, Lyubov Glebova, head of the Federal Service for the Oversight of Education and Science, flew to Voronezh, in the southern part of the country, as soon as she found out that students’ scores in the city were the highest on most of the seven parts of the national exam.
“You are the country’s leaders on Unified State Exam results,” she announced at the regional meeting of school and higher-education authorities in Voronezh. Unaware that she was about to accuse them of tampering with test scores, the crowd of local bureaucrats applauded her statement.
Ms. Glebova fired the head of the regional education authority, and several exam organizers will not be allowed to continue in those roles this year.
Russia still lives with the Soviet mentality of keeping information secret and presenting fake pictures of life, says Yevgeny Yasin, director of research at the State University Higher School of Economics, in Moscow. Even so, in a country where people tend to follow the signals given by authorities, he is hopeful.
“It will take a little longer,” he says, “but the time of transparency will eventually come to the Russian education system, as it did to many Western countries.”
Back at Kazan State, Mr. Sadrislamov, the security chief, is optimistic about the university’s anticorruption efforts. “This examination session we have not heard anything about bribes, so far,” he says. “We will see. We have a few more weeks to go. I’ve dealt with corruption, received tips from students about professors taking bribes every examination session in my six years at this university. If I do not hear about it this time, it means our campaign is successful.”
