Some time ago, I had a talk with an older friend and mentor Alexander Asmolov, Professor, Head of the Psychology of Personality Department of the Psychology Faculty Psychology at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, Director of the School of Anthropology of the Future at the Institute for Social Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), Full Member of the Russian Academy of Education, Doctor of Psychology. He is the founder of a unique communication platform, Rectorium. We discussed many essential issues that could be interesting for my readers and I am going to share them with you today. 

Eduard Galazhinskiy:

- Professor Asmolov, what inspired you to design the Rectorium platform? 

Alexander Asmolov:

- Let me start from afar. Lately, I have been suffering from a shortage of three things. Using the language of mythology, I would call them three pillars of the universe. They are the shortage of value, the shortage of understanding, and the shortage of trust. They are directly connected with the university: what happens when there is no “university of value”, “university of understanding”, and “university of trust”? What happens is the university loses the meaning of the word “universal”. The university by its nature is a master of “embracing the unembracible”. We need the university to be a champion in “embracing the unembracible” or a champion in generating common values. It would help to prevent the word “university” from being impaired if I might say so. Every time we call a university “research” or “entrepreneurial”, we cut off a big part of its essence.

In fact, we are creating a new system of profiles without giving it a lot of thought. What is a profile? No matter how wonderful it is, the profile is always a movement along a certain track. As soon as you said that the university has a profile, you fell into a rut from which it is very difficult to get out. And no contests or rankings enable you to do this. As a result, universities lose their value, understanding, and trust.

We need a special competition, which would be aimed, if you will, at generating the semantic identity of the university. If some rector said: “Listen, I saw an inversion of Viktor Shklovsky's The Hamburg Account in my dream last night. I saw that we are not being measured by Shanghai or any other ranking agency, but like wrestlers in Hamburg are going to see who is really the strongest of us without a referee. At the same time, we are not obliged to report and fall into the Procrustean bed of control. Each of us sets a task for ourselves: how would I see my university if I were … 'a rector without brakes'”? By the way, this metaphor just now occurred to me. Such a rector could “take off” and turn the university space into a cosmos! 

Such a line of thought led me to the idea of creating the Rectorium platform. What is it? It is the “house of the immense embrace”, where the rector speaks not only about his or her important professional lines, but brings together unique people to discuss the future identity of the university: for example, famous artists and actors, or the most famous Nobel Prize winners who write popular books. Why do we need to communicate with such people? You recently mentioned that the Nobel Prize laureate Harald Zur Hausen came to your university and shared his unique vision of the world. Rectorium, if we speak our psychological language, is a place for generating insights that would help the rector to create their own team. And it would not be a team of people united by functional characteristics, but a team that generates development. For this, we need a platform so that the rector, communicating with extraordinary and very creative people, could have a breakthrough and become a driver of unusual and even strange (!) things in their university, without fear of being strange. As long as we are afraid of being strange, we embark on a sad path in which the triumph of insignificance can prevail. 

EG:

- It means that in order for such meetings and conversations to take place, a concentration of mature people, ready for such dialogues, is needed: people who are capable of leading them at a certain level of managerial and professional reflection, need this. Did you feel a demand for the creation the Rectorium platform and how did the universities respond to it? This is interesting to me because I sometimes give lectures at the Skolkovo School of Rectors about the transformation of Tomsk State University. This School, which has already completed 19 student intake sessions, is attended not only by rectors but also by managers of various levels representing Russian universities. They are all immersed in the logic of development and pumped through all related contexts. It must be admitted that increased bureaucracy is clearly not conducive to being reflective and “strange”. Many believe that such a "strangeness" can end badly. In this regard, I am interested in your opinion on the number of people in the university system who are able to reflect and be “strange” and who need such a communication platform as the Rectorium. 

АА:

- By definition, there cannot be many such people. I feel normal rationality and fair skepticism in your question. I agree that in the pragmatic world the emergence of “strange” institutions is literally an oddity. But at the same time, let me remind you that such "strange" institutions were nevertheless created. For example, the Club of Rome, which appeared thanks to the Italian public figure and businessman Aurelio Peccei, gave rise to a number of unique initiatives. In particular, scientific experiments led by Jay Forrester and Dennis Meadows simulate the global consequences of rapid industrialization in the face of dwindling resources of the planet. In our country, this kind of function was performed by a number of individuals who came together to "do strange things." What they did became truly great. If we wanted to see, for example, how new universities and scientific areas are born, we would need to study the history of Alexei Lyapunov’s seminar. He was a famous mathematician who conducted seminars at Moscow State University in the the1950s and 60s. These seminars, called "Machines and Thinking", were attended not only by mathematicians and physicists. The great psycho-physiologist Nikolai Bernstein, the writer Vsevolod Ivanov, the philologist and semiotician Yuri Lotman, and the genius of pattern recognition Mikhail Bongard attended. They were looked upon as doing strange things. However, the sprouts of their activity gave such models that are used in our time in the development of artificial intelligence and many other modern things. Lyapunov's seminars, bringing together talented people from all over the Soviet Union, became the embryo of new ideas in various fields of science. Largely thanks to this interdisciplinary seminar, cybernetics, bionics, the theory of computer programming and many other advanced spheres began to develop successfully in the USSR. 

Let me remind you that in 1946-1947 our foreign colleagues assembled their "Institute of Imagination", a special analytical center financed by the Pentagon. The name of this center was RAND (an acronym for Research AND Development). This innovative project involved, for example, the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch and the neuro-linguist and mathematician Walter Pitts, who created the first model of an artificial neural network. And that doesn't surprise me. But the neuroscientist and psychologist Gregory Ashby, the great Margaret Mead, the creator of cultural anthropology, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, the futurist writer Francis Fukuyama, all worked at RAND... Based on the developments of the mathematician and cryptanalyst Claude Shannon and other scientists, they took and created a structure called the Internet. I'm talking about the inventions and innovations of "strange" communities as the first advanced studies, built on the principle of redundancy, or "usefulness of the useless."

This principle was taken up by the domestic scientific and academic community. It is important that it is precisely those universities that could afford such redundancy, which achieved outstanding results! 

Returning to the beginning of our conversation, I can say that the idea of the Rectorium platform was born in a conversation with one of my close acquaintances - Slava Polunin, a wonderful  professional clown. I worked with him on several occasions and saw how he mesmerized various audiences. Therefore, yes, all this may seem strange, but the benefits from such an approach can be absolutely fantastic for our university culture. 

EG:

- Our points of view coincide completely: I am also convinced that a classical university is a special institution that differs from other universities precisely by its redundancy. We have been comprehending this feature, as well as the idea of authenticity and classicism of university education, all these years and defending it in our development program. Meanwhile, the university today really has many faces. Largely due to the fact that some time ago, a variety of higher educational institutions began to be called universities. At the same time, the very idea of the universe - as the idea of keeping the complex unity of knowledge, civilization, nature, and man in this knowledge - began to blur. From this point of view, only a classical university holds the idea of a true universe. Firstly, such a university is always about complex humans; about their meanings, values, the world around and its formation in our super-complicated era. Secondly, it is about the study of the deep laws of the existence of life on Earth, about the fundamentality and interdisciplinary methods, and so on. And thirdly, it is about openness.

Now, being at the next step in our development, we are discussing the topic of "breakthrough university", as we call it, realizing that the university is a platform for the future in the present, where the future is "tested". We can put together the correct history of development, including technological, anthropological, and civilizational ones, only due to the very redundancy mentioned above. In developing this "theme of the future," I recalled a discussion that took place several years ago at the University of Leiden. It was called "To Whom Does the University Belong?" This discussion arose after the rector of the University of Amsterdam asked the students who came to her office to fight for their rights to leave HER university. The students were outraged by the idea that the University was not THIERS, they raised student trade unions, local media, and so on. We were discussing TO WHOM the university really belongs. After heated debates, everyone finally came to a consensus: in fact, the university belongs to future generations. It does not belong to current professors or students. This is the place where the future takes place. 

Undoubtedly, your initiative to create the Rectorium platform is extremely timely. Today, only universities and a relatively narrow circle of thinkers can take responsibility for shaping such an agenda as “university redundancy”. Unfortunately, in the era of the knowledge economy, universities are expected, first of all, to provide pragmatic answers to all the questions posed, and to increase impact factors and incomes. Recently, Tomsk State University hosted an interesting lecture by Alexey Maslov, Director of the Institute for Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He talked about how modern Chinese universities function. It turns out that they work exactly like corporations: they take out loans from banks; make startups; bring technologies to the market; and receive income from commercialization. However, they can go broke, go bankrupt, and close. That is, they are like universities, but not in our sense. These are knowledge corporations focused on generating income from their intellectual activities.

In my opinion, such an approach is a huge risk for the very idea of the university as a social institution that has kept the integrity of nations, states, and humanity for centuries. Today we see that in connection with technological achievements and the triumph of the ideas of transhumanism, the boundaries of man have been loosened. In this regard, universities also have a special responsibility to maintain an anthropological framework. 

AA:

- As you remember, one of the last big projects that I implemented with my colleague, RANEPA Rector Vladimir Mau, was called the School of Anthropology of the Future. And this is no coincidence. Your preoccupation with anthropological issues and themes of the future is literally a balm for my soul. The anthropological framework of the university is the immensity of man. As you know, we often repeat the formula "Man is the measure of all things." And I continue this formula, "And only because man has no measures." In other words, only the immeasurable can be the measure of all things. What does it mean to keep the anthropological framework? It means that the university, in any of its creative activities, must be a master of the anthropology of the future and the examination of anthropological risks that accompany the development of any technologies.

I love the Chinese people "with the love of a brother, and maybe even more." They quickly pragmatize any solution. They are very good at that. But if China starts literally stamping (I don’t put a bad meaning in this word) universities as intellectual commercial corporations, the country will start losing again, as has happened more than once in its history. At the moment when someone chooses the narrow path of commercializing success, he or she loses. It is called a "Martin Eden syndrome": death on the crest of success. Perspectives are lost and, as my teacher Alexei Leontiev said, a shift of motive towards a goal occurs. You wanted the university to make more money, and the result was a shift towards commercialization. You create a structure aimed at making money and ... you lose your university.

EG:

- While on a new cycle, universities must choose new priorities. The national Priority 2030 program encourages us all to think about the focus of our activities, about clear goals and objectives related, first of all, to the country's economic growth and technological breakthrough. We understand the importance of these tasks, and we will also accept the stakes. But the retention of the redundancy of the university and its orientation towards human complexity is no less important. Otherwise, the child can be thrown out with the water, as Chinese universities are potentially doing today.

AA :

– Once there was a moment when I was interested in the topic of tolerance to uncertainty. In this regard, I wrote a paper "Complexity as a subject of research", which I later renamed "Development of Education". In fact, the test of complexity is a key redundancy threshold for our higher education. But it also has to do with identity.

You said that the identity of Tomsk State University lies, among other things, in its classicism. I hope it never loses this. TSU has always had ambitions, and without ambitions, there is no movement. “Unambitious” is translated into Russian, from my point of view, by the word “wingless”. In order to have these wings, you need to see the horizons. Tomsk State University by its nature acts as the core of the university city, and this is its horizons. In my opinion, there is no other city in Russia that could claim the title of university city because Tomsk can compete with all cities in Russia in terms of the number of students.

To be continued

Eduard Galazhinskiy, 

Rector of National Research Tomsk State University,

Acting President of the Russian Academy of Education

Translated by Snezhana Nosova