The Discreet Soviet Humboldt. Elements of Freedom of Study and Teaching in Soviet Universities in the 1950s–1980s

The article is devoted to the consideration of the Humboldt ideal (and, above all, the academic freedoms inherent in it) and its significance for the education of a critically thinking personality and for a modern society. The author examines the history of attempts to adapt elements of the Humboldt model in pre-revolutionary Russia and the USSR. Agreeing with philosopher Vitaly Kurennoy’s conclusion that “the Humboldt university model has never been implemented in Russia” and recognizing that this is especially true in relation to the Soviet period, when universities were subjected to total bureaucratization and state control, the author insists that there are some nuances in this matter. If they had not been there, it would have been impossible to explain the rise of science in the USSR in the 1960s and 1980s, which obviously required mechanisms for training talented scientists other than bureaucratic and standard ones. Firstly, in the 1950s and 1960s, a number of experimental universities were established at the Academy of Sciences (Phystech, Novosibirsk University), where partially Humboldt principles (education through science, relative academic freedoms) were applied. Secondly, even in ordinary universities there were compensatory mechanisms that allowed applying a “special approach” to talented students inclined to scientific research (individual curriculum, electives, special courses, etc.). Thirdly, scientific seminars resembling Humboldt’s “free” education operated at universities (legally or semi-legally)

Academic freedom · Bureaucracy · Higher education · Educational Philosophies and Pedagogies · European Linguistics and Anthropology · Historical Architecture and Urbanism