Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov has approved a new charter of the Russian Academy of Sciences proposed in March this year by a general meeting of the RAS. The charter has retained all of the academic community’s main proposals, which fundamentally contradicted the version developed in the Education and Science Ministry.
As reported on Tuesday by Yury Osipov, an academic and the president of RAS, at a general committee meeting of the Academy of Sciences, according to the new charter the academy receives state status, and the nomination of its head is approved by the president of the country. The election of the president of the academy shall be held by secret ballot. If the head of state does not approve the elected president of RAS, then after six months new elections will be set. At the same time, the RAS has the right to nominate the same candidate that it did the first time. Besides this, according to Osipov, the elected president of the Russian Academy of Sciences will be able to hold his post for only two terms, but the condition on introducing age limits for heads of academic bodies is absence.
Although the document has not yet been officially published and very few have seen the final version, it is possible to confidently call this an overwhelming defeat for the Education and Science Ministry, which for several years has tried tooth and nail to integrate RAS into the executive power vertical. Government officials sought to amend the special status of the Academy, which is at the same time the direct recipient and the main distributor of federal budget funds, yet is in fact not accountable to state supervisory authorities.
In February 2007, the government drafted a new charter of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which virtually turned the academy into a “club of scientists;” moreover, a supervisory board, composed mainly of representatives of the government, would govern the academy.
This was the last straw for the academic community. In March, at a general meeting the academy almost unanimously approved its own version of the charter, which had nothing in common with the proposals of the Education and Science Ministry.
Such unusual, by today’s standards, and unanimous defiance from scientists led to the Education and Science Minister Andrey Fursenko dramatically softening his position. “We are trying to find a compromise for the governing of science in order to eliminate administrative barriers and establish a clear zone of the rights and responsibilities of the Academy of Sciences,” the Minister explained. By giving the RAS rights, it at the same time removes it from direct financial responsibility to the government, as now the academy rather than the Education and Science Ministry will be responsible for unauthorized spending of state funds. But now the Russian Academy of Sciences will also have to agree its every step with government officials.
However, an end has not yet been put to this confrontation: the Russian Academy of Sciences will finally approve the charter at its general meeting on 19 December this year.
Ali Aliyev
Photo: ITAR-TASS
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