EDITORIAL
Polina Surina doles out a Real Russian “Education”
The Moscow Times reports:
Polina Surina, 26, an instructor at the School of Government at Moscow State University, has been hit with new fraud charges in a case that has rocked the educational establishment. Surina, whose father is the dean of the school, was detained on April 26 and charged with accepting a bribe of 35,000 euros ($46,000) from a prospective student. But the district prosecutor’s office dropped the charge, which carried a maximum punishment of five years, drawing criticism from the Investigative Committee. Nina Ostanina, a State Duma deputy with the Communist Party, has accused Vyacheslav Volodin, a senior United Russia official and a professor at the School of Government, of intervening with investigators on Surina’s behalf. The city prosecutor’s office reopened the case on a new charge of fraud carrying up to 10 years in prison after a video of Surina accepting the money leaked onto the Internet, Interfax reported Tuesday. Her father, Alexei Surin, dean of the School of Government, will leave his post Friday because his term has expired, Interfax said.
Let’s be crystal clear: the sordid case of “Professor” Surina is in no way an aberration. This is simply the Russian education system in microcosm, and nobody who has spent any serious time in Russia would dare deny that. And it’s richly fitting that, of all things, Surina is a professor of government, that most corrupt of all Russian institutions. Not long ago, we reported on a massive scandal involving bribery at the Russian prosecutor’s office.
How could it be otherwise, when Russia in its “wisdom” pays full professors at major universities only a few hundred dollars per month, not enough to rent their own apartments. Such “educators” have no practical choice other than to take bribes from students to make ends meet.
And how could it be otherwise, when Russia is documented as being one of the most corrupt nations on the face of the earth. Statistics dictate that even if Russian teachers were paid a living wage, they would still engage in all forms of horrific corruption just like the rest of the country. That’s the status quo ante in Russia.
The results are predictable. Russia is a nation with population going extinct from its ignorance, ranging from the decision to place a proud KGB spy in charge of the country to the decision to eat a diet barren of vegetables and full of fat to the decision to smoke to excess, drink to excess, drive cars like lunatics and practice no more fire safety than your average arsonist. Why is AIDS rampant? Why is life expectancy not in the top 100 nations of the world? The answer is simple: ignorance and stupidity, born of one of the most shockingly diseased educational systems on this planet.
La Russophobe 
Swedish proverb
“Sådan herre sådan hund.”
Translation: “Like master like dog.”
Putin accused of plagiarising his PhD thesis
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article695235.ece
According to Clifford G Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings, 16 of the 20 pages that open a key section of Putin’s work were copied either word for word or with minute alterations from a management study, Strategic Planning and Policy, written by US professors William King and David Cleland. The study was translated into Russian by a KGB-
related institute in the early 1990s.
Corruption is abysmal here in Russia. It makes you wonder to find an official that does not want a bribe. Still most do their work when they have no pretext to extort a bribe.
As to Putin – there’s a good song:
:)
Russian higher education is no more corrupt than America’s with its “diversity quotas” and other racial biases. One dean of Harvard exclaimed how delighted he was when it turned out that one of the accepting students was an “illegal alien”.
At least in Russia, you can pay to get “an education.” In America, you pay to get indoctrinated in Marxism.
Having said that, to be fair, America’s higher education is much better than Russia’s but it could be much better if the professors taught instead of preached.
I don’t know about the general level. I have seen one very good, and another quite below the average Western university. Both had no corruption, as far as I know.
We have diversity quaotas as well.
In Russia, there are quite a few Universities where you can get a very good education, but even there they won’t teach tyou how to use it, that’s the difference with the West.
He used the word “corrupt” referring to Harvard etc. in a different sense, meaning excessively politicized in terms of left-wing ideology. Which is very true, particularly in “humanities” sector, i.e., sociology, history, philosophy and similar “sciences.”
But I don’t think Harvard professors solicit bribes, I don’t think Mr. Kolchak meant that
“But I don’t think Harvard professors solicit bribes, I don’t think Mr. Kolchak meant that”
And here it ends:D
Well, fun aside, I do understand what kind of corruption he means.
But sorry, there’s no such thing as right-wing social science.
You dislike Marxism, you don’t go and study sociology.
But being indoctrinated in marxist sociology is still better than being indoctrinated with values of corruption in it’s most simple sence.
Of course there were plenty of conservative and even right wing thinkers, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that a lot of universities in the U.S. are corrupt in the sense of being rotten and dominated by ideological doctrinaires.
Of course it only applies only to those social and political “scientists” of whom there is a legion and who are just leeches. People involved in serious things like astronomy or mathematics or chemistry or medicine are not like that.