Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2016 number 4

In the conditions of complex systemic society transformations, the Russian universities face new challenges that are connected with the necessity of organizational transformation for their integration into the world scientific-educational community. The relations between a university and its environment are characterized by the increasing asymmetry between the requirements of this environment and the university’s abilities to respond to them. Under the influence of growing and crossing pressure of challenges, the universities have to change their curriculum and faculty, and also to modernize their material resources and equipment: in the conditions of post-industrial society, not only technology transference and knowledge translation are required of the universities but also production of the advanced scientific knowledge. In such conditions, the traditional approaches to organization and practice of university education can no longer allow adequately reacting to the constantly changing requirements of the society. As a result, competitiveness of the Russian universities at the global scientific-educational market decreases: in the system of the world ratings, our universities’ positions are far from the desired. The conducted analysis of the development of the American universities that are at the highest lines in the world ratings helped us to point out the key factors that fundamentally influenced on the success of the scientific knowledge production, its translation and commercialization in the era of complex social-cultural transformations. On the basis of the carried out analysis, it is concluded that the Russian university which is oriented towards the increase of its competitiveness among the leading world scientific-educational centers, and, consequently, towards inclusion into the world ratings has to be more autonomous and to interact closely with the Academy of Science, because fundamentally the systems of fundamental knowledge production in Russia and in the USA are different from the beginning. Such approach helps to react adequately to new challenges of the society, providing high mobility of the research corpus, professorial staff and studentship between different areas of knowledge, various educational bodies and scientific-research institutions that may have a positive effect both on the system of new scientific staff training and on the process of fundamental knowledge reproduction in general.