Higher Education In The Post Communist World

Originally published in 1999, Higher Education in the Post-Communist World focuses on specific public universities during their, and their nations’ early transition years (1989-1995) from communism to democracy and the changes from centrally planned, to free-market economies. The book offers a detailed view of universities in transition rather than case studies of entire systems of higher education, providing an opportunity for readers to understand the national politico-economic transition on higher education– individual faculty, students, and administrator; departments; and university – in a more immediate way than a system-wide approach would. The book presents information on specific universities and how the demise of the Soviet Union affected the governance, finance, faculty, students, and curriculum in several post-communist countries.

Originally published in 1999, Higher Education in the Post-Communist World focuses on specific public universities during their, and their nations’ early transition years (1989-1995) from communism to democracy and the changes from centrally planned, to free-market economies. The book offers a detailed view of universities in transition rather than case studies of entire systems of higher education, providing an opportunity for readers to understand the national politico-economic transition on higher education– individual faculty, students, and administrator; departments; and university – in a more immediate way than a system-wide approach would. The book presents information on specific universities and how the demise of the Soviet Union affected the governance, finance, faculty, students, and curriculum in several post-communist countries.

To what extent have universities in post-Communist states adopted the practices and habits of their branded and consumer-oriented equivalents in the English-speaking world? While not assuming that university education in those states reflects in any mechanistic way the regulated, business-led system long established in places such as the U.S. and now being dramatically realized in countries like Britain, this edited collection identifies some marked shifts in the direction of what might best be described as "neoliberalization," examining its particularities in local situations where establishment ideologies were, until the early 1990s, deeply alien to all kinds of commercially driven entities. Many of the authors are concerned not only with the linked issues of commercialism, instrumentalism, bureaucracy, and managerialism, framed locally and nationally, but also with the meaning and purpose of universities outside or against their status as efficient gatherers of income. The collection makes specific reference to Lithuania, Hungary, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Georgia and Russia, and takes in both theoretical and empirical studies of diverse but connected subjects, including the marketization of the academy, regional reactions to globalization as expressed in the representational rhetoric of specific curricula, the role and place of civic education, comparisons between educational settings, pedagogies for a critical and ethical consciousness, corporate and state demands and their effects on academic freedom, and the positive potential of new communication technologies. In all these cases, the system of neoliberalism, or rather an uneven process of neoliberalization, forms a backdrop to the particular issues discussed.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This open access book is a result of the first ever study of the transformations of the higher education institutional landscape in fifteen former USSR countries after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It explores how the single Soviet model that developed across the vast and diverse territory of the Soviet Union over several decades has evolved into fifteen unique national systems, systems that have responded to national and global developments while still bearing some traces of the past. The book is distinctive as it presents a comprehensive analysis of the reforms and transformations in the region in the last 25 years; and it focuses on institutional landscape through the evolution of the institutional types established and developed in Pre-Soviet, Soviet and Post-Soviet time. It also embraces all fifteen countries of the former USSR, and provides a comparative analysis of transformations of institutional landscape across Post-Soviet systems. It will be highly relevant for students and researchers in the fields of higher education and and sociology, particularly those with an interest in historical and comparative studies.

This book offers a comparative analysis of value and identity changes in several post-Soviet countries. In light of the tremendous economic, social and political changes in former communist states, the authors compare the values, attitudes and identities of different generations and cultural groups. Based on extensive empirical data, using quantitative and qualitative methods to study complex social identities, this book examines how intergenerational value and identity changes are linked to socio-economic and political development. Topics include the rise of nationalist sentiments, identity formation of ethnic and religious groups and minorities, youth identity formation and intergenerational value conflicts.

The collapse of communism and the adoption of parliamentary democracy led to rapid and dramatic educational change in countries formerly under the control of the Soviet Union. Leaders of the affected countries acknowledged the need to develop educational systems during the rebuilding process and embraced this transformation in a short period of time. This has provided researchers with a unique opportunity to investigate educational change as a 'living laboratory'. In this book, the authors explore the complex nature of change in five former communist countries: Russia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and East Germany. The authors consider: * Educational change as a process rather than as a event * A comparison of such changes against a model for educational change developed by Michael Fullan for understanding large-scale educational reform * Analysis of issues at the national level where the original impetus for change has occurred With contributors from countries affected by such changes, this book provides an insight into the process of educational change as a result of revolution rather than evolution. This book will be of great interest to academics and researchers of educational change and those involved with educational reform. It will also interest those looking at comparative education models and postgraduate students focussing their studies on issues of educational change and reform.

An exploration of international privatization of higher education in post-communist Europe from two top scholars in the field. Levy and Slantcheva trace the ramifications of globalization in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in the former Soviet republics.