The start of the “5–100” project was promising. The Russian state assigned fifty-seven billion rubles for its implementation in 2013–2017 and added slightly more funds later. The Ministry of Education and Science, with the help of an international board, selected twenty-one state universities to participate in the project, including the HSE and the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys (Livanov had served as rector of this institution before taking his ministerial post). All these universities presented roadmaps to implement the “5–100” project, which involved a significant rise in the proportion of international students and scholars, a major increase in the quantity and quality of academic publications (particularly in international scholarly outlets), and several other steps. However, two leading institutions, the Moscow State and Saint Petersburg State Universities, were deliberately excluded from the project. The formal argument was related to the fact that these universities already occupied top positions in global rankings, but this move also made it possible to exclude their influential rectors from being involved in the venture (which was especially true in the case of Viktor Sadovnichiy, the notoriously isolationist rector of Moscow State University). Putin’s patronage of the project enabled it to maintain its budget (relatively high by Russia’s standards), despite cuts in some of the ministry’s expenditures at the end of 2014. However, the advancement of Russian universities in global rankings soon faced major challenges.
First and foremost, the “5–100” project was too short-term in terms of its time horizon: it was measured in years rather than in decades, like the Project 211 and Project 985 in China, which aimed to achieve similar goals of global advancement of Chinese universities.70 But such a long planning horizon was unrealistic for Russia, because the political leadership does not consider potential benefits in such a distant future. The fact that the achievement of the project’s goals by 2020 was perceived as impossible by top managers and participants in the project greatly affected all incentives—the community of leaders of Russian higher education was interested not in achieving the final results but in demonstrating partial and temporary advancements at the level of interim reporting. The scope of funding for the “5–100” project was also insufficient for its ambitious goals, especially because its resources were spread among more than twenty recipient universities. Finally, the mechanism for implementing the project and the requirements imposed on universities by the Russian state did not involve irreversible structural and institutional changes to university governance, let alone an increase in their organizational autonomy aimed at successful long-term development of these institutions after the end of the project. It is no wonder that some of the universities included in the “5–100” project perceived it as a one-off massive inflow of state funds, a kind of sizeable gift, which should be met with appropriate reporting on publications and internationalization and nothing more. Even when some university-level policy entrepreneurs initiated innovative ventures, they faced a shortage of resources, limited time horizons, and multiple tensions with scholars and administrators. This is why, for example, the ambitious School of Advanced Studies at Tyumen State University (one of the beneficiaries of the “5–100” project) has encountered major schisms and conflicts, and it is highly doubtful whether it can fulfill its great promises. 71
In addition to these problems, the project faced challenges of a different kind. After 2014, the policy priorities of Russia’s political leadership shifted from developmental goals to geopolitical adventures. The project, aimed at international integration of Russian higher education, poorly fit these new priorities. In 2016, Livanov, the major driver of the “5–100” project, was fired from his ministerial post, while his successors had limited bureaucratic influence and demonstrated little interest in their predecessor’s initiatives. Later, however, in the wake of reorganizing state agencies, the project came under the auspices of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, and in early 2020, Valery Falkov, the former rector of Tyumen State University, was appointed as a minister. Overall, however, the success of the “5–100” project was mixed at best; although advancement of the Russian universities in global rankings was visible,72 it was insufficient to achieve the project’s goals. However, the HSE and some other institutions greatly improved their positions in the rankings for several disciplines. In some cases, however, efforts to improve global rankings at any cost brought undesired effects, such as contracts between Russian universities and consulting firms that were themselves involved in making international university rankings: this was justly considered a conflict of interest. 73
The prospects for further extension of the “5–100” project in somewhat different format (also known as Priority 2030)74 look rather questionable. While one should not deny the major progress made by some Russian institutions of higher education, especially regarding internationalization and publications, and the emergence of some university-driven initiatives beyond the HSE, these achievements have not resulted in qualitative changes to the landscape of Russian higher education (at least, as of yet) and have not given rise to a cumulative effect of successful development of the sector. None of the universities involved have demonstrated achievements comparable with those of the HSE, and its best practices have been disseminated only with significant difficulties.
The experience of “5–100” has demonstrated the problems with transferring success stories beyond their initial contexts. The dissemination of best practices is one of the instances of policy diffusion that are aimed at institutional isomorphism, “a constraining process that forces one unit in a population to resemble other units that face the same set of environmental conditions.”75 Scholars have outlined three types of diffusions that lead to this outcome, namely coercive, mimetic, and normative. Coercive diffusion, promoted by the state, has the strongest effect on the behavior of individuals and organizations, especially in authoritarian settings. Yet coercion is hardly an effective means of achieving success stories, especially when negative incentives are weak (there are no repressions in Russia for inefficient top managers in the public sector even in cases of total failure), and its long-term positive incentives are questionable. Mimetic diffusion, when the top leadership chooses role models from a menu of possible options, is also problematic given the low organizational autonomy of state-led projects and programs. Finally, normative diffusion emanates from sources that are perceived to be “legitimate and reputable.”76 These sources of isomorphism are complementary, but under conditions of bad governance, none of them contribute appropriately to dissemination of best practices. The normative sources and role models for top managers are not successful policy entrepreneurs, but rather successful rent-seekers; in the public sector, they dream of behaving like Yakunin rather than like Gref. Without top-down pressure, the dissemination of best practices by top managers of companies and organizations may result in their prosecution by the overregulated state, especially if they achieve success. Furthermore, coercive diffusion rarely coincides with resource endowment, which is necessary to achieve and maintain success stories, and this is why these pressures may lead to short-term campaigns or attenuate the best practices, which may result in less-than-best consequences. Moreover, state-led projects and programs that lose priority status and/or funding become vulnerable to the threat of normative and mimetic diffusion from role models of rent-seeking and passive adjustment to ever-changing state regulations and producing meaningless reporting. In such situations, coercive diffusion from the state toward former (or failed) success stories, alongside personnel reshuffling, may contribute to their bastardization and make it irreversible.