St. Petersburg State University is best known as an incubator of many of Russia’s leaders, past and present. Lenin was a graduate, as are both the current prime minister and the president.
But the institution that is sometimes referred to as Russia’s Harvard is now making news for a less distinguished reason: an ugly public fight between its rector and some faculty members. Deans have been dismissed, federal authorities have started criminal investigations, and accusations have flown back and forth for more than a year.
In some ways, the conflict is a sign of how corruption—and the fight against it—is shaping modern Russian higher education. Stories are rampant about administrators’ illegally renting out office space and professors’ trading bribes for grades.
But at St. Petersburg State, an anticorruption campaign by the rector, Nikolai M. Kropachev, has divided the campus, with opponents accusing one another of threatening to ruin a venerable institution.
To his supporters, Mr. Kropachev is fighting to save St. Petersburg State and cleaning up a university that had been marred with fraud. Under the previous leadership, a top administrator was charged with embezzling construction funds.
But others say he is going too far to stamp out such problems, raising questions about how much authority a rector should have.
While most Russian universities have tried to become more democratic and have given faculty members more say in the institutions’ futures, Mr. Kropachev is doing the opposite, says Maria Lipman, an analyst in the civil-society program at the Carnegie Moscow Center, whose husband is a visiting scholar at St. Petersburg. The trend at most institutions “is all about round tables, discussions, brainstorming, and new ideas,” but Mr. Kropachev has insisted on being “an old-fashioned administrator,” she says.
Accusations and Petitions
Mr. Kropachev, who is also dean of St. Petersburg State’s law school—his area of expertise is criminal law—became rector of the university in December 2008 and almost immediately began a sweeping public campaign against corruption.
Much of his scrutiny has focused on a married couple on the faculty, Sergei Petrov and Marina Shishkina, who ran the university’s medical and journalism faculties, respectively.
In April 2009, Mr. Kropachev removed Mr. Petrov as medical dean, accusing him of failing to file the proper paperwork while hiring doctors for the university-affiliated medical clinics he managed. After an internal investigation, the university administration said Mr. Petrov had used part of a medical-school clinic located in a wealthy section of St. Petersburg to serve private clients and had charged fees for the use of diagnostic equipment.
Shortly afterward, the ministry of internal affairs, the main law-enforcement agency in Russia, began investigating the medical faculty and Mr. Petrov for possible fraud.
Mr. Petrov has denied any wrongdoing, saying university officials had signed off on using the clinics to generate revenue. He filed a court complaint to regain his position and accused the rector of heavy-handed methods.
“This is a purely political case, and it has nothing to do with corruption,” Mr. Petrov said in an interview with The Chronicle. “To show his absolute power and authority, the rector sends police to investigate his main critics and shut them up.”
To support Mr. Petrov, several faculty members of the medical school signed a petition and sent it to Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev—who used to be a professor at St. Petersburg State—complaining about the university administration.
‘Burden of Paperwork’
A few months after the dispute with Mr. Petrov arose, the corruption investigation spread to the journalism faculty and Ms. Shishkina, who was already known for calling Mr. Kropachev an “authoritarian leader.”
Without discussing it with faculty members, the rector appointed an outsider—the editor of a local newspaper—as head of the journalism program’s entrance-examination commission. At the next gathering of the university’s Scientific Council, a board of 72 faculty members that traditionally sets policy, Ms. Shishkina questioned Mr. Kropachev’s management style."Our real work is replaced more and more with the burden of paperwork,” she said. “The rector intends to strengthen his control and supervision functions.”
A majority of the council’s members, including 18 deans, subsequently wrote a letter asking the rector to fire Ms. Shishkina for her statements. Last July the university began auditing the journalism department’s finances.
Elena Dobrokhotova, a senior professor at the law school who leads internal investigations of faculty members, says a six-month inspection of the journalism faculty found illegal acts and administrative violations, including misappropriation of at least 700,000 rubles (about $23,000). The ministry of internal affairs is conducting an embezzlement investigation.
Ms. Shishkina denies all of the accusations, saying that her department’s work is “transparent and legal.”
The public fight has upset students and disrupted academic life. In a gathering outside the university’s main gates last summer, a group of students glued pieces of black tape across their mouths and unfurled a big “Help” sign addressed to President Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Kropachev talked with some of the protesters for five hours behind closed doors. After the meeting, students told reporters that he had convinced them that some of the issues under investigation should not be debated in public.
The students quoted the rector as saying, “Our university is one big family.”
Marina Filonik, a professor on the medical faculty who objects to Mr. Kropachev’s management, says the meeting with the students turned public opinion in favor of the rector: “From that point, the rector just strengthened his authority, and all courts and policemen in town seemed to sympathize with him, as their children study at our university.”
‘Teacher of the President’
The battle between the rector and members of his faculty is an important one for Russian higher education because of St. Petersburg State’s historic pedigree.
The university, with its hallways of dark oak and library shelves heavy with century-old books, was founded by Peter the Great in the 18th century. It became a gateway to the civil service in Czarist Russia, and during the Soviet era a recruiting ground for the KGB. Today it trains the government and business elites who run the country and its major industries, like gas and oil.
Mr. Kropachev himself has close ties to the Kremlin; he was running the university’s law school while Mr. Medvedev was a law professor there, and the president supported Mr. Kropachev’s candidacy to lead the university. The relationship has earned Mr. Kropachev the nickname “teacher of the president.”
With such powerful political connections, Mr. Kropachev faces intense pressure to run a model national institution and to root out corruption.
The Chronicle was denied an interview with the rector, and his staff members said he would decline to comment for this article.
Lyudmila Verbitskaya, Mr. Kropachev’s predecessor as rector, has praised him for “finally coming to put a justified end to corruption.”
She told The Chronicle that during her tenure, corrupt officials were “penetrating the university.” In 2006 federal authorities charged her deputy, Lev Ognev, with stealing thousands of dollars that was intended to pay for the reconstruction of a campus building. He was sentenced to eight years of suspended jail time and later granted amnesty.
The incident led Ms. Verbitskaya to step down about a year before the end of her tenure as rector.
She has challenged the claims of Mr. Petrov and Ms. Shishkina, filing libel lawsuits against them for discrediting the university, the rector, and herself."Unfortunately, our loud critics do not care much for the university’s dignity,” she says.
Most of the professors on the campus appear to agree.
Yuri Kombolin, a senior professor with 20 years of experience on the journalism faculty, says he is pleased that Mr. Kropachev has put so much effort into anticorruption efforts. “It is sad to see how our dean, Shishkina, by attacking the rector, finds excuses to save her own reputation,” the professor says.
Others, however, are troubled by Mr. Kropachev’s actions.
Forty university faculty members formed a union, called Universant, “to protect professors’ rights from suppressive absolute power of the rector,” says Sergei Samoletov, assistant dean of journalism, who is the group’s leader.
The union is primarily concerned with the rector’s efforts to change university rules.
St. Petersburg State’s administration has rewritten a regulation to allow the rector to dismiss senior officials without approval of the Scientific Council. Last month the rector pushed through a reorganization of the university’s leadership structure, further decreasing the council’s oversight power.
“This the total collapse of the democratic system our university used to have,” says Mr. Samoletov. “The rector is taking steps to strictly centralize control over our professors.”
As for the deans who have come under fire, they face an uncertain future.
After a yearlong investigation, Mr. Petrov has not been charged with a crime. He continues to work at the university as a professor and an administrator at the medical school.
His wife, Ms. Shishkina, also remains under investigation, but no formal charges have been filed. However, her 20-year career at the institution appears to be over.
Despite stalled careers, criminal investigations, and accusations of libel, the two continue to speak out against the rector. “In his two years of rule, Rector Kropachev caused more damage to St. Petersburg State University than all czars and Soviet bureaucrats together,” says Ms. Shishkina. “He destroyed the university we used to know.”
