Letter to the Moscow Times

Mitchell Orenstein

Saturday 9 December 2000

In response to "The School Where Putin's People Learn to Rule," an essay by Gleb Pyanykh, Nov. 15.

Editor,

I found Pyanykh's essay very amusing. Sounds like old times. Or perhaps a strange future. But I'm afraid it gives an inaccurate impression of the state of public administration education in Russia today and the policy of the Putin administration in this area.

The premier public administration school in Russia today is not the bizarre school Pyanykh profiles, but the School of Public Administration at Moscow State University, or MGU. Founded in 1993, MGU teaches future public servants how to apply serious social science training to the service of public ends. Your readers will be relieved to know that this school also has Putin advisers on its faculty. Indeed, President Vladimir Putin supported the MGU School of Public Administration receiving a large grant from the U.S. State Department to establish a partnership with the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, one of America's oldest and best schools of public administration. The program was announced at the summit with U.S. President Bill Clinton earlier this year and enjoys the support of both presidents. The future of public administration education in Russia is a serious issue, demanding attention from top levels of the Russian administration and the donor community.

I have been teaching in the MGU program this fall and have been deeply impressed by the work of the faculty and administration in building this new school at a very difficult time. The School of Public Administration was launched as an institute of MGU in 1993 by rector Viktor Sadovnichy, under the leadership of Dean Alexei Surin, and has been growing by leaps and bounds around a new model of public administration education for Russia. The school now has approximately 700 undergraduate students and 150 aspirant candidates of science. Both programs have graduated their first classes and are steadily improving. Applications to the Candidate of Science degree program leapt dramatically last year, making it more selective and demonstrating student recognition of the value of the degree. The school is busy refining its curriculum and methods of instruction, and with the help of the U.S. State Department grant is purchasing new computer technology enabling high-tech distance education from branch campuses in Tolyatti, Yaroslavl and Yoshkar-Ola, as well as access to Internet library resources in Russian and English.

Serious schools of public administration in Russia face major challenges. One of them is resources. A second problem is the state of public administration in Russia itself. Graduates of the School of Public Administration sometimes have difficulty finding jobs in public administration and instead face widespread suspicion of their modernizing attitudes and questioning minds. For now, many top graduates take jobs in Russian companies that better employ and reward their skills.

There will likely always be a diversity of public administration programs in Russia. Russia does not have a single, national school of public administration linked to the government, as in France, and probably never will. Therefore, different schools will take different paths and some less well-established than others. But with the dedication of individuals, such as those running MGU's School of Public Administration, and the support they are getting from the Russian state and thousands of parents seeking a serious public administration education for their children, anything is possible - in fact, more than we might expect.

Mitchell Orenstein
Assistant Professor, Syracuse University
Visiting Assistant Professor
MGU School of Public Administration

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2000/12/09/010.html