Gift-Giving in the Academic Environment

September 05 | 2024

The specifics of networking to promote your people and those loyal to your cause. Part 2

Katja Ivanović

Photo: Assistants, senior lecturers, associate professors, and professors at regional universities paid exorbitant salaries for celebrity specialists whom they drew in through “networking.” Photo by Jason Pofahl on Unsplash

In the first part of this piece, we discussed under-the-table schemes for obtaining an academic degree in Russian academia. In the second, we will discuss what other types of favors are exchanged.

 

Publications as an Object of Exchange

Having publications indexed in international databases is an important component of a university’s ranking. It is this push to publish that has given rise to new shady practices that remain outside the scope of many studies.

  • For example, the editor-in-chief of a scientific journal is invited to lecture at a university, after which the journal publishes a series of articles affiliated with the university.
  • Or a university helps “guarantee” the creation of a new section in a particular journal, and then this section is filled with publications affiliated with the university.

Thus, one Project 5-100 participant, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, “contributed” to the creation of a section in one of the leading Russian journals. Subsequently, this section was filled with paid articles by university employees. The journal has been ranked in Q2 of the Scopus database since 2018. That being said, during the same time period, the university also actively purchased publications in bulk from frankly dubious journals, unashamed of conducting these relationships within the framework of government procurement.

The number of publications is becoming a key indicator of a university’s ranking. As a result, some universities participating in Project 5-100 began publishing “on an unprecedented scale” in predatory journals. Employees of one university published more than 1,500 articles in such journals.

 

Providing Incentives. In their relentless pursuit of publications, many universities did not even ask questions about the quality of the journals in which their employees were publishing. And official attempts by individual organizations to prevent publication in predatory journals were the perfect guise for schemes to form a list of “good journals” with “connected people.”

During the implementation of Project 5-100, Russian universities became a convenient platform for promoting foreign business by directly or indirectly including specific organizations or magazines in the motivational incentives being provided by these universities.

For example, the Higher School of Economics clearly demonstrated how lobbying for the interests of committee members can lead obviously weak journals to be included on “white lists” under their patronage—even as worthy publications competing with these journals are excluded from the motivational scheme.

The scheme may play out as follows. A foreign employee of the university is recruited to represent the editorial board of a little-known foreign journal and is very interested in promoting it. Due to a “lucky set of circumstances,” as the journal is published in the Balkans and would otherwise be unlikely to be included, the journal is placed on the list to receive personal bonuses from the leading Russian university.

For comparison, neither the leading Russian economic journal Voprosy Ekonomiki nor the journal published by the renowned London Research Centre were included on this list.

Affiliated graduate students and co-authors of the editorial board member benefit from these bonus payments, but that’s not all. The journal itself also gets a boost in rankings due to the influx of foreign authors and the links they generate.

Among the journals being promoted are those published by little-known universities and organizations, and even those that have only just begun to appear in international citation databases and cannot boast significant success. This raises the question of what underhanded plots have led these incentive packages to be adopted.

 

Topics. It is not only individual journals, but also specific areas of study that have become popular with experts compiling incentive lists. For instance, an invited foreign scientist joins the editorial boards of journals on sports economics—and the entire discipline begins to receive additional financial motivation from the university. Publishing in journals included on the Higher School of Economics’ white list, for example, brings authors working at the university monthly bonuses that exceed the annual salary of an associate professor.

You can find similar stories at various universities. Thus, the incentive system at Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University allotted 50% more bonus funding to areas in which members of the university administration specialized.

 

Playing the Rankings Game. No less important are other aspects of the publishing process that influence a university’s rank.

In 2022, the Don State Technical University, a regional Russian university, placed in the top 600 universities globally on the THE World University Ranking with a citation impact score of 96.9—higher than that of Cambridge. In 2022, universities from Palestine, Egypt, Ghana, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Sri Lanka all received the maximum score—100 points—in the THE ranking for citations. These figures exceed those of such world leaders as Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.

These examples demonstrate perfectly that with sufficient desire and resources, any ranking can be manipulated—and such opportunities are not available to the cream of the academic crop.

 

Grant Applications as an Object of Exchange, or “You Give to Me, I Give to You”

While conducting projects actively supported by the state, Russian and foreign scientists have exchanged grants. In fact, the same project could receive considerable funding from various universities in various jurisdictions.

In some cases, the invited researchers did not publish any joint articles with their colleagues at the host university. Evidently, the university administration received other benefits from these exchanges—ones that were not always obvious to the untrained eye.

As a result, the universities being promoted have entire departments where their main employees do not even have a profile in Scopus, and scientific laboratories are being managed by people without any publications or academic degrees. In a miracle of Russian ingenuity, there are grants and articles, but no research team.

Universities receiving considerable funding not only happily bought the prestige of foreign (and Russian) scientists, they also actively created this prestige by paying for publications and including these scientists on grant teams.

Among the slew of publications purchased by one of the regional Project 5-100 universities is an article by employees of the Russian Academy of Sciences in which the “generous” university is only mentioned as the second affiliation of one of the five main authors. Thus, over the years of active financing, Russian universities have formed entire teams of “dead souls” who have simply masked the existing order in the organization.

Over the past two years, the situation has acquired a special flavor. There have been cases where a foreign professor has declared the collective guilt of all Russian passport holders and has nevertheless continued receiving grants from the Russian government.

 

A Foreign Professor at a Private Business School

An important indicator in university rankings is the number of foreign specialists working at the university.

As part of high-profile projects like 5-100, universities attracted specialists to “LWS” (leading world scientist) positions. Russian organizations understood perfectly that attracting foreigners required a different level of wages than they paid locals.

  • For example, the salary for an employee on an international contract at the HSE, when calculated per hour of work, was more than 20 times higher than the salary of a regular employee in an identical position.

However, Russian universities often attracted LWS specialists exclusively from among those known to the administration, without conducting a real, competitive public search for candidates. There were also examples of international contracts being granted to home-grown specialists, such as a graduate of the university who defended his PhD in Europe with the support of the personnel reserve program of his Russian alma mater.

Employees contracted into LWS positions may have only a Russian Candidate of Science degree, or even just a Master’s degree—yet receive millions of rubles to pay several visits to the university per year. Particularly interesting are the cases in which these visiting foreign specialists devoted a greater amount of time to working in a private business school owned by the director of the department hosting them. As a result of this exchange, the host department received quite substantial financial benefits.

 

Meanwhile

Incidentally, the decision to continue funding Project 5-100, adopted as a result of the value of the ruble falling in 2014-2015, caused a 10% reduction in the scholarship fund for all universities in the country. Many universities decided to increase the teaching staff’s workload while maintaining the level of administrative salaries.

Under Project 5-100, the salary of a professor at a regional university could be less than 30,000 rubles per month (with a standard of 900 hours of workload per year, the classroom load could reach 100%). Meanwhile, assistants, senior lecturers, associate professors, and professors at regional universities paid exorbitant salaries for celebrity specialists attracted through “networking” for the universities they financed.

 

***

An analysis of predatory practices of Russian universities allows us to identify individual factors capable of transforming the environment into an instrument for legitimizing any state action.

The implementation of academic programs through the mechanism of gift exchange has constructed a system of specific incentives in the academic environment. This system creates opportunities for certain close-knit groups to extract private benefits by supporting areas of study and types of activity through their “patronage.”

It goes without saying that this creates fertile ground for censorship, within the framework of which any discussion of academic freedom can only be hypothetical.

 

Katja Ivanović is an independent researcher.

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