“Values are not transmitted the way knowledge is;

they arise within a space of interpretation and choice.”

“Values exist only to the extent that they are lived and felt.”

Paul Ricoeur

“Values do not exist outside action

they live only in a person’s responsible stance.”

Mikhail Bakhtin

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes

but the preservation of fire.”

Thomas S. Eliot

The first edition of TSU Rector’s blog in the new year is devoted to a conversation about values, the challenge of how today’s young people relate to them, and the role the university plays in this process.

— Eduard Vladimirovich, January is usually a time for plans: what we are launching, what we are strengthening, what priorities we are setting. But we are starting the year with a conversation about values. Why?

— Because plans without meaning turn into inertia very quickly. You can draw up roadmaps perfectly, break the year into quarters, assign responsibility, define indicators, and then at some point realize that there is movement, but no real understanding of direction. Fr om the outside everything may look quite fine, but inside fatigue starts to build, along with a sense of emptiness. The beginning of the year is a rare moment of relative pause. Not in the sense that nothing is happening, but in the sense that we have not fully accelerated yet, and everyday urgency has not taken complete hold. In that pause, there is a chance to ask ourselves and each other questions that, in the usual rhythm, we often postpone. Among them are questions about values, about what is fundamentally acceptable to us and what is not, even if something seems profitable or efficient.

For me, a conversation about values is a conversation about inner criteria and boundaries. A university is not a diploma issuing service. It is a place wh ere a young person gradually develops an inner framework: the ability to think, to choose, and to take responsibility for that choice. If we begin the year by talking only about plans, we risk talking about means while forgetting the goal and why it was set in the first place.

— What, exactly, would you like to fine tune at the start of the year, in yourself and in the university?

— The ability to hold on to meaning in everyday life, so that the year does not become an endless run in circles around tasks, but remains a movement in which people understand why they are here and what truly matters to them, in their profession, in human relationships, in their relationship to the country and to themselves. Second, attention to what counts as the norm. At a university, a great deal is decided not by orders and strategic documents, but by what is considered normal in daily life. For example, how we argue, how we treat a mistake, as a failure or as experience; how we react to those who are weaker and how we react to those who are stronger. Whether we allow an uncomfortable position, or try to smooth it over as quickly as possible. That is the university’s value fabric. It is not always visible or spoken aloud, but it is precisely what shapes the atmosphere in which students and faculty live. Young people are very sensitive to this. They instantly pick up where a conversation is serious and where it is formal, done just to tick a box.

One of the questions worth asking at the start of a new year is this: do we still sustain complexity, or are we already beginning to simplify reality into ideas that are convenient for us? Because in simplification, values very quickly turn into slogans and instruments of pressure. In complexity, they remain a support that helps us navigate the most difficult situations. If values are postponed for later, they still come back, but no longer as a conscious choice, rather as consequences. Sometimes as conflicts. Sometimes as distrust. Sometimes as students feeling that the university is simply a system of procedures, not a space for becoming an adult. That is exactly the scenario I would very much like us to avoid.

— Can we say that the university today is responsible not only for education, but also for a person’s inner resilience?

— I would put it this way: the university cannot take responsibility for a person’s entire life. But it can provide a very important experience, the experience of a thoughtful relationship to oneself, to knowledge, and to the world. This does not guarantee correct decisions, but it forms the habit of asking questions and seeing consequences. The modern world changes very quickly. It is full of uncertainty, noise, contradictions. In such a situation it is especially important that a person have inner reference points. Not imposed, but developed. The university is one of the few places where this process can happen relatively safely, without pressure and without haste. If the university retains the ability to be a space for an honest conversation, not simplifying, not manipulative, then there is no need to specially “teach” values. They begin to take shape naturally. And perhaps this is one of the university’s key tasks today.

— When the conversation turns to values and the university’s influence on young people, the word “manipulation” appears quite quickly. It is often used as an accusation. How appropriate is it to frame the question this way?

— Whether we like it or not, manipulation as one way of influence is an integral part of human communication. We all influence each other in one way or another. Parents influence children, teachers influence students, and so on. Children and students, in turn, also influence parents and teachers, often very successfully. This is a normal, living fabric of social relations. But we need to distinguish influence as socio psychological impact, where the goals are transparent and obvious to everyone involved, fr om influence as manipulation, wh ere the game is played in the dark for the person being manipulated. So, the question is not whether manipulation exists. It always exists. The question is different: what is its purpose, how conscious is it, and does a person have the ability to recognize it and reflect on it. Fr om a psychological point of view, the most problematic form of influence is hidden, unrecognized influence. When a person believes they are making decisions freely, but in reality, they are being gently pushed in a desired direction, with no space left for questions or doubt. This is wh ere risk arises, both for the individual and for society.

— So, the university’s task is not to eliminate influence, but to make it transparent?

— Exactly. The university cannot and should not be a sterile space where no one influences anyone. That is utopia. But it can be a space where influence is named, discussed, and becomes an object of thought. That is the fundamental difference between education and manipulation as a hidden form of influence. Education expands consciousness and gives tools of discernment. Manipulation narrows consciousness and tries to make those tools unnecessary. When we talk with students about complex topics, history, culture, politics, technology, we inevitably influence them in some way. But if at the same time we leave them the right to ask questions, to disagree, and to reach their own conclusions, then this influence becomes developmental rather than suppressive. And here it is very important for the university to be honest with itself and to preserve within its community people who hold different views and positions on the same important questions. If we declare values but do not allow discussion, we effectively reproduce the same model of hidden pressure that we claim to oppose. Young people feel such contradictions very quickly.

— Are you not afraid that this approach looks too “unmanageable”?

— On the contrary. I am afraid of manageability without meaning. A manageable person without inner criteria is a risk both for themselves and for society. The university should not produce convenient people. It should help people become responsible. Responsibility is not obedience. It is the ability to relate one’s actions to their consequences. To understand that choice always has a price that you will have to pay yourself, rather than shifting it onto the system or circumstances. If we talk about values seriously, we must be ready for the fact that they show themselves not in words and slogans, but in situations of choice. When you could stay silent, but you take the risk of speaking. Or when you could hide behind a formal role, but you step beyond it. And here the university can provide a very important experience of safe but real responsibility. Not an imitation, not an “educational event,” but a situation in which something truly depends on the person.

— Do you mean practices such as volunteering, projects, participation in public life?

— Yes, but with an important caveat. Any practice can become a formality if it exists in isolation. Volunteering for the sake of reporting is no better than a formal lecture about values. What matters is not the number of events, but the quality of involvement. When a person encounters a real task, real people, real consequences of their decisions, values stop being an abstraction and are tested for strength. Sometimes that is painful, but without it, growing up does not happen. For the university, it is important not to replace experience with instruction and not to turn a living situation into a pre-written script. We need to create a space where a person can make mistakes, draw conclusions, and change. Of course, that requires trust, both in students and in faculty.

In this sense, a conversation about values is a conversation about trust as an institutional norm. About whether we are ready to recognize the student as a subject, not an object of influence. If we are, then this conversation has a chance to be honest and alive. If we are not, it will remain a set of correct words.

— Today there is a lot of talk about manipulation in the digital environment. How does this change the university’s responsibility?

— Significantly. Because a large part of influence on a young person today happens outside university walls, through algorithms, feeds, recommendation systems, AI. And unlike a university conversation, this influence is usually not named and not reflected upon. In this situation, the university has a new task: to teach people to recognize influence. Not only someone else’s influence, but their own as well. To understand what emotions, meanings, and reactions texts, images, and technologies trigger in you. To ask yourself: why does this seem convincing to me? on what grounds do I accept one explanation of the world rather than another? This, in essence, is work with values in their contemporary form. Not the imposition of a “correct position,” but the formation of an ability to see the frames within which that position arises. If a person can do this, they become far less vulnerable to crude and subtle forms of manipulation, fr om both people and technologies.

We spoke about many of these problems related to building the value potential of the younger generation at a seminar in Sevastopol, organized in late October on the personal initiative of Valery Falkov, Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation. Shortly before that, he noted that everyone who receives higher education in Russia should, among other things, develop knowledge of a worldview nature that helps cultivate conscious patriotism in students. And to achieve this, it is necessary to develop unified approaches to creating the sociohumanities part of the “core,” which will become one of the key principles of the new model of higher education.

The seminar cast a lot of light on this, as did the visit to the museum and temple complex New Chersonesus.

— What, in this experience, turned out to be fundamentally important for you?

— The very nature of the conversation. We talked not so much about curricula and lists of disciplines, but about growing up. About what makes a person resilient in a situation wh ere the world changes faster than instructions are upd ated. By habit, we often think of the university only as a place for transmitting knowledge and building competencies. This remains important. But today it is increasingly obvious that knowledge without an inner backbone is a risky combination. A person can be a strong specialist, master complex tools, make technically flawless decisions, and yet remain internally uncollected, easily suggestible, unable to distinguish the boundaries of what is acceptable. Given the technological capabilities we have today, and especially artificial intelligence, the price of such distortions becomes too high. That is why the conversation about a humanities core is not a story about adding a few humanities courses. It is a conversation about what a graduate takes with them fr om the university as a human being. What reference points remain when they leave the classroom and face situations wh ere there are no ready answers and no correct formulas.

For me, it was essential that this conversation was not smooth. People with different views and different intellectual traditions took part, representing different spheres of our society’s life. In particular, there were philosopher Alexander Dugin, DNA of Russia project leader Andrey Polosin, Metropolitan of Simferopol and Crimea Tikhon, and Valery Falkov, Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation. Figures who offer different optics and provoke different reactions. And that is normal. Because if a conversation about values creates no tension, it means it is superficial or formal. Foundations always touch a nerve.

— What, in your view, was the main difference between the positions?

— In how they described the source of support. Almost everyone agreed on one thing: support is necessary. But then the differences began. For some, that support is primarily connected to spiritual tradition; for others, to statehood; for others, to a philosophical school and a culture of thinking. And here a temptation arises: to fix everything as quickly as possible in a document, a formula, a concept. But no matter how many programs and concepts we write, a humanities core will only start working when it becomes part of daily university life. When a teacher stops “delivering a course” as a reporting task and starts speaking with the student as with an adult, with respect for their mind and freedom. When difficult questions are not pushed aside as “dangerous,” but become the subject of calm, reasoned discussion.

There is another point. We often understand the humanities core as a mandatory se t of subjects. In that form, young people instantly read it as a formality. I would phrase it differently: the humanities core is a set of challenging questions, without the discussion of which education turns into a “service” that merely maintains skills. History, philosophy, culture, ethics, the basics of law, an understanding of the state, these are not extra burdens for the sake of a diploma. They are tools for understanding context and the consequences of one’s own decisions. This is especially important in fields where decisions directly affect people. An engineer must understand not only how a system works, but also what happens to people if that system fails. An IT specialist must see not only an algorithm, but also the social effects of its implementation. That is professional maturity.

— It feels as though what worries you is not so much a lack of knowledge, but the erosion of criteria.

— Exactly. We live at a time when many things are declared relative. Even basic notions, dignity, responsibility, loyalty, justice, sometimes sound as if they are just words without stable meaning. For an adult this is already difficult, and for a young person even more so. They may doubt, argue, search, that is normal. But if there is only noise, irony, and constant devaluation around them, a void form inside fairly quickly. And here the university bears a special responsibility. We are obliged to preserve a culture of discernment. A culture of argumentation. A culture of respect for complex questions. If we do not, we will get highly qualified people who do not understand what to do with their competence beyond monetizing it in any way available.

In this sense, the humanities core is a kind of immune system. It does not give ready answers, but it forms the ability to distinguish substance fr om imitation, freedom fr om manipulation, responsibility fr om a convenient retreat into neutrality. A person who can think, read texts below the first layer, and see substitutions becomes less manageable and freer. And freedom without responsibility quickly turns into chaos. That is why the classical university now finds itself on the front line. We have everything we need for this core to be alive: strong humanities schools, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, history, law. But there is also a risk, to calm down and decide that if all of this exists institutionally, then the task is done. It is not. The humanities core does not live in a separate box. It is either built into the entire educational fabric, or it does not work.

— Earlier you mentioned visiting the museum and temple complex New Chersonesus, and that it, like the seminar itself, highlighted something important.

— Yes, of course. Because space also speaks. Sometimes even more strongly than words. We can discuss values anywhere. But when you talk about them in a place wh ere everything is assembled as an experience of history, attention switches on differently. You begin to perceive the topic not as abstract, but as personal. New Chersonesus is not a museum in the usual sense, not a display case of exhibits with labels. It is a space designed as an engaging route. Here history is not so much communicated as lived. And that is fundamentally important if we are talking about values. You cannot “put” them into a person with words alone. They start to work when a person meets them internally. Not when someone explained what is right, but when they saw, compared, felt, and drew a conclusion. So we need not only “boiling points,” as spaces for communication among representatives of government, business, and education in order to develop the country’s technological leadership, but also “points of support,” specially designed spaces for discussing and living through its history, culture, and spiritual foundations. In this sense, New Chersonesus offers excellent examples of such “points of support.”

By the way, one almost everyday detail caught my attention there: concrete paving with ceramic chips made fr om real ancient fragments. You are literally walking on history. Not next to it, not “fr om a textbook,” but on it, step by step. And that is a strong metaphor for how values should work in general. Walking along the “ancient” paths of New Chersonesus, I caught myself thinking that at universities we often move the conversation about values into a separate section: “educational work,” “events,” “ceremonial dates.” But here values are built into the very logic of movement: wh ere you go, wh ere you stop, what you look at, how the route is arranged. It is a strong pedagogical move.

For reference:

The museum and temple complex New Chersonesus in Sevastopol is one of the largest Russian cultural and historical projects, created by order of Vladimir Putin, President of Russia. On 20 August 2021, Metropolitan of Simferopol and Crimea Tikhon consecrated the foundation stone of the future complex. The site covers about 24 hectares, and in a year and a half of work more than 30 facilities appeared, including museums and public spaces. Construction was completed in summer 2024. The official consecration and opening of the complex took place fr om 28 to 30 July of the same year. The project was implemented in the historic part of Sevastopol, near the archaeological reserve Tauric Chersonesus, the territory wh ere, according to tradition, the Baptism of Rus’ took place in 988.

The complex includes several museums:

• Museum of Christianity, dedicated to the history of religion and its influence on culture.
• Museum of Antiquity and Byzantium.
• Museum of Crimea and Novorossiya, with more than 20 exhibition halls and multimedia installations presenting key events in the region’s history, fr om antiquity to the present day.

One architectural feature of the complex is its interactive multimedia zones, as well as smooth ramps beneath the building’s dome that allow visitors to ascend while immersing themselves in history through a sequence of installations. The project also includes elements of theatrical historical programs: performances, historical processions, and musical events take place here, making the museum not only a repository of artifacts, but also a space for experiencing history. During site preparation, large scale archaeological research was conducted, resulting in the discovery of more than 6 to 7 million artifacts fr om different eras, which in itself is a rare event for cultural and historical projects of this scale.

Based on materials fr om the online outlets Vedomosti and Simbirsk Diocese.

— But spaces like this, deliberately designed, always balance on a thin line. Form can start replacing meaning. Did that worry you?

— Of course, that risk exists. Modern visual culture can easily swallow the content. We live in an age of impressions, and if a university tries to compete with the entertainment industry, it will always lose. That is normal, because it is not our function. But in New Chersonesus, emotion does not work instead of meaning. It works as an entry point to it.

Here I should give credit to Metropolitan Tikhon of Simferopol and Crimea. Thanks to him, this museum and temple complex has found and implemented new formats of communication with visitors, and above all with young people, aimed at awakening a deep interest in the sources of Russian spirituality: patriotism, strong family, the priority of the spiritual over the material, service to the Fatherland, and historical memory. These formats involve powerful emotional experiences through installations, theatrical elements, and even participation in them. The natural landscapes, the architecture, the ability to touch historical artifacts, and much else all play their part.

So, form here is a door. If it opens, then thinking begins, and a new conversation begins. That part is already the responsibility of institutions such as school and university, and ideally the family as well. It is clear that if a person is left with nothing but an impression, it will fade quickly. But if there is an opportunity to speak it through, to ask questions, to argue, to compare, then an experience turns into lived knowledge.

I saw the reaction of young people in New Chersonesus, and it genuinely surprised me. They were not discussing whether they liked it or not. They were discussing quite adult things, simply in their own language. That is a rare sign that something has hit a nerve. In New Chersonesus, and in places like it, a young person feels a personal connection to history, not an abstract one. History stops being a set of dates and becomes a felt experience of belonging. A sense appears that you are not a random passerby in the world, but part of a long chain. For someone searching for support, that matters a great deal.

That experience made me look differently at the university environment. We sometimes feel embarrassed by “eternal themes.” We are afraid of sounding pompous. We are afraid of difficult conversations, because they demand maturity fr om students, and fr om us as well. So, we choose a safe form: beautiful events, correct speeches, rehearsed scenarios. But forms go flat when there is no meaning inside them.

And strangely enough, young people do not ask us only for entertainment. They ask for an honest conversation about what they carry inside: choice, loyalty, dignity, boundaries, responsibility. They may speak about it roughly. They may hide behind irony. But the request is there. The experience of New Chersonesus showed me that when we find a language and a form, young people do not run away fr om these topics. They engage.

— Still, what formats can help stitch a values conversation into university life? Not only in words, but so that it becomes experience?

— As a psychologist, I am close to the idea of combining three things: action, reflection, and regularity. Action is when a student is not a listener, but a participant. A project, volunteering, research, work with real people, real consequences. Values show themselves precisely wh ere there is responsibility for the outcome. Reflection matters because without speaking it through, experience does not turn into conclusions. Very often a person lives through something important and simply moves on. And the meaning there could have been enormous. That is why we need spaces wh ere we can discuss what happened, why we chose as we did, what was difficult, wh ere the boundary of what is acceptable ran. And regularity matters because a single event creates emotion, while regular practices create culture.

At the same time, we have to avoid two extremes. The first is pure declaration: “let’s educate,” “let’s shape values,” and then a set of events for the sake of reporting. The second is “let’s achieve the required result at any cost.” Sociohumanitarian technologies are an attempt to act differently: to design social practices that create a predictable effect without pressure on the person. Not to brainwash, not to drill, but to create an environment wh ere a person makes an inner choice themselves. Wh ere there is freedom, and also clarity that freedom has consequences.

This is difficult work. It requires both scientific understanding and a subtle pedagogical intuition. But a classical university has an advantage here: we have humanities schools that can analyze values, meaning, culture, and the mechanisms of identity. And we have young people who know how to try new things. If we connect these resources, we can create formats that work not for the picture, but for an inner result.

— And yet, how do we avoid sliding into formalism? Any format eventually runs out of steam.

— There is a very simple test: does the student have the right to their own position. If the format is built so that the student must give the “correct” answer, they will play a role. If the format is built so that the student can argue, doubt, ask uncomfortable questions, and not be sanctioned for it, then trust appears. And trust is the environment in which values become real.

Traditional event formats often stop working because they are too predictable and too safe. Everything is known in advance: who comes out, what is said, wh ere people smile, wh ere the photo is taken. It is beautiful, but the student has no role there other than the role of spectator.

To be clear, I am not against beautiful traditions. I am against them being empty. If a ritual cannot answer the question “why,” it quickly becomes decoration. Young people do not always know how to put this into words, but they feel it: “there is nothing for me to do here except sit it out and leave.” And that feeling is dangerous, because it gradually spreads to the university as a whole.

— How can we rebuild such a format so it does not look like a forced “modernization for fashion’s sake”?

— New Chersonesus offered a clue. First, you need a story. Any event that claims meaning must have dramaturgy. It should be clear who the hero is, what the choice is, what all of this is for. A procession is an ideal form for a story: movement, path, a transition fr om point A to point B. But we often make it only as a beautiful procedural picture, not as a narrative.

Second, participation and involvement. Not in the sense of “we came out and waved balloons and lanterns,” but in the sense of “we made something of our own.” For example, to carry during the procession not just the unit’s symbols, but a visualized idea, a story, a contribution. So that every faculty, every institute has not a decorative column but a meaningful one: “we do this for people,” “we solve these tasks,” “we have a tradition of service,” “we remember these people,” “we can do this.” It can be expressed in many ways. The key is that it is not invented fr om above, but created together with students.

Third, the event should be a starting point for the conversation that follows. Too often we treat an event as a finale: it happened, and that is it. But an event should become the beginning, for example, of an evening dialogue, a discussion, a meeting wh ere students can ask what truly worries them. And wh ere adults are capable of answering not with slogans, but honestly.

There is a fear, though. As soon as we say “performance,” “dramaturgy,” “contemporary forms,” the fear appears that it will be either a circus or a piece of agitation. That is a fair fear. So, I will repeat: form is not important by itself, the principle is. Form should serve meaning, not replace it. And here the simple criterion I mentioned earlier applies: does the student retain freedom of inner reaction? If the format is built so that the student must “feel correctly,” it is propaganda. If the format is built so that the student can argue, doubt, ask uncomfortable questions, it is adult communication.

— You said that young people lack deep conversations. About what, exactly? Which topics do you consider truly “hot,” even if they do not appear in the official agenda?

— The topics are very simple and very difficult at the same time: love, trust, loyalty, dignity, justice. Questions of identity, the meaning of life, how to be human in a world with so much cynicism and so much noise. And of course, the topic of boundaries: wh ere freedom ends and destruction begins; where “my opinion” ends and harm to others begins.

In this sense, postmodernism really has scattered a lot. It taught us to doubt everything, and doubt has a useful side. But if doubt becomes the only stance, a person loses support. Young people feel that. Sometimes they hide behind irony, but often it is not conviction, it is a defense. And if the university can offer not moralizing, but conversation, calm, adult, respectful, then young people engage.

— And where, besides classrooms, does young life happen today? How do we bring a serious values conversation there?

— In campus spaces, in student communities, in projects, online. And not only in social networks, but in formats that are natural to them: short videos, podcasts, chats, meme culture. I do not see a problem in that. The problem is not the form, the problem is the content. If we want to talk about values with young people, we must be ready to speak in their language without simplifying the meaning. It is delicate work: to keep depth and not sound like “adults who came to educate.” But it is possible. The experience of New Chersonesus is telling in this sense: they managed to find a form that does not insult a young person’s intelligence.

Later, New Chersonesus unexpectedly connected two themes for me that are usually kept on different shelves: values and technology.

— How, exactly?

— Very simply. We are used to thinking that values are formed through upbringing, culture, personal example, conversation with a teacher. All true. But today a huge share of a young person’s communication happens not with a teacher and a book, and not even with friends, but with a screen, with algorithms. And more and more, with language models that answer confidently, quickly, persuasively. Sometimes far more persuasively than a living person. So, the question of values directly becomes the question of what meaning field a person lives in. Who sets the frames of language, explanations, and what is considered “normal” in general?

We often describe AI as a neutral tool. But it is not neutral. It reproduces not only information, but ways of discernment: what matters, what is secondary, where the boundary is between fact and interpretation; which words “stick” to each other and which do not. That is a values charge. It does not appear mystically. It appears fr om who teaches the machine, and what they teach it.

For reference:

Artificial intelligence and values: who teaches machines, and what

Modern research increasingly emphasizes that artificial intelligence is not value neutral. Language and recommendation models reproduce not only knowledge, but also norms, hierarchies of importance, and ways of interpreting the world that are embedded during training. In other words, AI absorbs a values framework fr om its teachers: developers, commissioners, and data sources. The values settings of AI are formed on three levels:

1.      at the design level, which tasks are considered priorities and which are considered acceptable

2.      at the data level, which texts and corpora are treated as “representative”

3.      at the level of classifying knowledge, which connections between concepts are treated as “natural”

Sources:

1.      Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Yale University Press, 2021, a foundational analysis of why AI is not neutral

2.      UNESCO, Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, 2021, an international document on the cultural and values conditioning of AI.

We can have our own curriculum, our own history and philosophy courses, our own conversations about values. But if a young person always has in their pocket a polite, intelligent interlocutor who constantly explains the world in a different system of meanings, we have to take that into account. And here a seemingly odd story surfaces from a completely different sphere, libraries.

After visiting New Chersonesus, I had a conversation with Denis Tsypkin, director of the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, about whether library catalogues could be used as a semantic structure for training AI. It may sound unexpected. But the key is hidden precisely in that oddness. A library catalogue is not a list of books and not a title search. It is a map of meanings and a system of connections built over decades: topic, context, authority headings, classification, intersections. In other words, it is a ready model of how culture has structured itself. Not through random internet noise, but through real, deep knowledge assembled by a professional community.

We keep looking for “data” to train AI: texts, datasets, corpora. But data is not yet meaning. Meaning appears when there is structure. When you understand not only which words occur near each other, but in which coordinate system they live. A catalogue is precisely such a coordinate system.

Here is an example we discussed. When we say “fascism,” we activate one historical and conceptual system in our minds. When we say “National Socialism,” a different system activates. Formally, we may be talking about the same phenomenon, but the semantic emphasis shifts. And with it, what conclusions feel “natural” and “normal” also shifts. This is not an argument about words. It is an argument about how the meaning map is built. AI lives on these maps. It does not merely generate text, it reproduces the connections that are embedded in it. If AI is trained on random, opaque data masses, it reproduces a chaotic, often aggressive picture of the world. But if it relies on curated knowledge systems, it becomes possible, at least, to see which values foundations are embedded in it, and to discuss them openly.

That is why a conversation about values in AI is not ideology and not propaganda. It is a question of what structure of meanings underlies the model. And if those connections are assembled on someone else’s cultural matrix, we get an effect that is hard to notice immediately. The problem is that these effects accumulate quickly and begin to change earlier cultural codes.

— So in the context of “universal human values,” a library suddenly turns out to be not about the past, but about the future?

— Exactly. And that is the turn that shook me up, in a good way. We are used to opposing the humanities and the technical sphere. But in fact, the humanities today are becoming the infrastructure of the technological. Because if we cannot structure meaning, we will not be able to create resilient technologies that work in our cultural environment.

There is something else. Catalogues are good because they were originally built around verification. This is not information noise. This is knowledge that has passed through professional filters. And if universities want to be not only “suppliers of personnel,” but suppliers of meaning infrastructure, then a huge zone of work appears for their libraries: corpora, dictionaries, ontologies, thematic maps, source databases. It sounds dry, but in reality, it is the production of cultural sovereignty in a practical sense.

— By the way, how do you relate to the concept of “universal human values”? Some opinion leaders claim that no “universal human” values exist. For example, political philosopher Pavel Shchelin argues that Russia is not capable of offering the world something fundamentally new, and that it is mistaken to hope to unite everyone on the basis of universal values. In his view, it ends in disappointment every time. What do you think?

— I am familiar with Pavel Shchelin’s position and I follow his talks. They are always substantive, though not always beyond dispute. As an Orthodox Christian, the very idea of good and justice is of course close to him. But yes, he believes that in the real-world order, values common to everyone are unattainable. And he is not alone. Across the world, many philosophers are skeptical about the idea of a universal moral law. They often point out that each culture is unique, and attempts to impose a single set of values lead only to conflict.

There is a rational point in Shchelin’s words: you cannot impose your system of values on everyone around you. I agree with that. Values have to be accepted from within, by the heart, otherwise they are hollow words without meaning. But on the other hand, I am convinced that there is something that goes beyond cultural and religious differences. For example, what has always been understood across cultures and religions as virtue. Researchers of ancient texts confirm this. And that is exactly what Shchelin himself called “the eternal.” In one interview, he even remarked that Russia’s special mission might be precisely to offer the world the eternal, meaning values that do not pass away.

From an interview with Pavel Shchelin:

“Russia cannot offer the world anything fundamentally new. But it can offer the eternal. That is the main difference. The new will not save anyone: in truth, it only continues the run in circles. What is the idea of the new? The new is a continuation of closing in on chronos, on linear, progressive, technological time. That is why any ‘new’ will eventually, through a franchise, pass to whoever holds the franchise. And perhaps I will disappoint some people, but Russian culture does not hold the franchise of the new. But the eternal is closer to us. And that may be the main thing we do not fully understand about ourselves. If we speak about Russian culture, all its calling and all its strengths, even as reflected in Russian high literature and high art, are not about chronos, but about eternity.”

Source:the interview available on Rutube.

If we take seriously the thought that Russian culture is strong not in the “franchise of the new,” but in an experience of the eternal, then the university becomes one of the few places wh ere this eternal can be discussed without mythologizing and without self humiliation. We live simultaneously in the logic of chronos, in national project calendars, roadmaps, digital platforms, and in the logic of eternity, when the conversation is about dignity, loyalty, mercy. The university’s task is to teach a young person to hold both optics without being torn between them.

And here we return to wh ere we began. The university is a place of growing up. And in conclusion, I want to say this: Russia can undoubtedly offer the world a new, fresh, values based image of technological leadership. Not a cult of efficiency at any price, but respect for human dignity as a built in parameter of the system.

Rector of TSU Eduard Galazhinskiy,
Member of the Council for Science and Education under the President of the Russian Federation,
Vice President of the Russian Academy of Education,
Vice President of the Russian Union of Rectors

Interview recorded and reference material compiled by Irina Kuzheleva-Sagan