Intellectual Leadership Challenges in Post-Totalitarian Universities

This paper will examine the challenges of intellectual leadership in post-totalitarian universities. Drawing on examples of the post-Soviet academia (e.g., Russia) and its replicas in Eastern Europe (e.g, Poland, Lithuania, Georgia and Ukraine), and East Asia (e.g., China and Vietnam), this study analyses and compares correlations between failures in systemic, institutional and idiosyncratic pursuits of freedom in teaching, research and service in higher education. The academic choices often appeared to be compromised during the dictatorial regimes. Ministerial oversight often implied hyper-centralization and over-regulation of teaching processes. Only ideology-relevant and censored research projects had opportunity for ministerial and institutional approval. Universities under dictatorship had perverted practices of peer-review, access to globally-significant literature, international networking, and critical thinking. While the Soviet-times intellectuals were often prepared to compromise their freedoms in order to survive or to get promotion, their leadership lost integrity in the times of opening to the global framework of academic development after 1991. The building of a global research university in the post-Soviet times (between 2000-2018) manifested that most post-Soviet intellectuals were unable to re-orient themselves to the open and competitive frameworks of inquiry and participation. Social sciences and humanities have been the most vulnerable fields in that regard. Very few scholars of the Soviet times in those fields have developed collaborative frameworks to allow for influential scholarship in the global domains of science. Very few of those scholars have been known to act as prominent academic citizens or public intellectuals at home in restructuring their institutions or ministries toward a robust and competitive system of higher education. This paper engages data from the project “De-Sovietization of Higher Education”, sponsored by Hong Kong Research Grants Council, to discuss the aforementioned challenges and failures.