Russia Scholars Hope for an End to Their Field’s Bear Market

Sergey Guneev, Sputnik via AP

Ted Gerber never took his eye off Russia.

The same could not be said of college students, politicians, and the media. Russia remained a superpower after the Cold War, but as a prime geopolitical threat it receded from the American imagination, crowded out by Islamic extremism and the Chinese economy.

In 2015 Mr. Gerber, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, crunched some numbers and found that Russia was fading from parts of higher education, too. “Russian studies within the social sciences are facing a crisis,” he wrote in a report for the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, noting “an unmistakable decline in interest and numbers, in terms of both graduate students and faculty.”

The shrinking number of Russia experts in political science was especially notable, said Mr. Gerber, since that field used to be a haven for those scholars.

Then came the 2016 presidential election, along with reports of Russian cyberattacks aimed at sabotaging Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Mr. Gerber did not fully appreciate the implications until election night, when he watched with shock as Donald J. Trump surged to victory.

The Russians just stole the election, he remembers thinking.

The specter of Russian meddling has stayed in the news. Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, resigned this week following reports that he had misled the vice president about his conversations with Russia’s U.S. ambassador. His resignation was soon followed by reports that Trump aides had been in regular contact with Russian intelligence officers during the presidential campaign.

Russia may be reclaiming a place at the forefront of American political consciousness. What could that mean for Russian studies?

The number of students focusing on Russia and its region rose after the fall of the Soviet Union, then declined in the late 1990s before leveling off in the 2000s, according to Education Department data. In 1994 nearly 1,200 students earned bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degrees in Russian studies and related fields. In 2014 the number was below 800.

Funding for Russian studies has also dipped since the 1990s. Back then the State Department was giving out close to $10 million annually in research grants to academics studying Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe, according to Lynda Park, executive director of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Last year, says Ms. Park, the department gave out only $1.5 million under that program. Meanwhile, the Education Department has slashed funding to university programs that focus on specific geopolitical regions, including the former Soviet Union. Private philanthropies, such as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, have stepped in to fill the gap, but over all there is less money available to Russia experts and their students.

After the election, some academics wondered if renewed fears about Russia might lead to renewed interest in their field.

“Certainly, Russia is in the news a lot, and it could potentially be great for Russian studies,” says Ms. Park.

But she cautioned that academic trends move at a slower pace than the news. Even if current events do precipitate a swing of the pendulum, enrollments and funding will not reappear overnight. “There’s lag time between a sudden public interest,” she says, “and people studying it and becoming experts in the field.”

Waxing and Waning Interest

Donald J. Raleigh, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specializes in Russia, says the specter of Russian interference in U.S. politics, which cuts closer to home than a military conflict in Ukraine, should provide great fodder for Russian scholars who are competing for funding and open faculty positions.

When it comes to students, however, news events may fuel short-term bursts of interest that are liable to wane. Students might get interested in learning Russian because that country is in the news, says Mr. Raleigh, only to realize that actually mastering a Slavic language requires more than a passing interest.

“Whenever Russia is in the news, our first-year Russian-language courses double,” he says. “And by the second semester they’re back to normal.”

Sibelan Forrester, a Russian professor at Swarthmore College, agrees that students who choose to make Russian language and culture the centerpiece of their educations are usually inspired by something more than the news.

As a graduate student at Indiana University in the 1980s, Ms. Forrester remembers going to class alongside clean-cut kids who wanted to be U.S. spies and long-haired kids who wanted to be communist revolutionaries.

But it was the ones studying Russia for nonpolitical reasons, she says, who tended to stick with it. Ms. Forrester was there because she had fallen in love with Russian poetry as an undergraduate.

She joined the Swarthmore faculty in 1994, the tail end of her field’s heyday. Since then, her college has added Japanese and Arabic. Russian fell into a middle ground between the exotic and the practical — “too difficult for someone who wants an easy language, and too European for someone who wants a real adventure.”

In late November, Ms. Forrester went to a conference in Washington, D.C., for scholars of Russia and its surrounding regions. Their hotel was less than three miles from the White House. Among her colleagues who study Russian culture, most of whom dislike President Vladimir V. Putin’s regime, there was a feeling of post-election unease in the carpeted hallways.

“All of those people were walking around, shaking their heads and saying, ‘Oh, God,’” says Ms. Forrester.

But not everybody.

“Some of the political scientists were rubbing their hands together and saying, ‘“We’re back.’”

Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.