New Standards and New Departments
On June 24th this year’s final session of the HSE Academic Council took place at the HSE, where original educational standards and new editions of educational procedures were approved and new departments of the university were founded.
The session started with a discussion of some staff-related issues. Members of the Academic Council approved the positions of some professors, associate professors and lecturers and appointed Yury Orlovsky, Head of the Department of Labour Law, and Eduard Baranov, Professor at the Department of Business Statistics as Tenured Professors at the HSE. Jörg Becker, Pro Rector of the University of Münster, Advisor to the German Government, became an Honourary Professor of the HSE. He has led The European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) for the last six years, a period where the centre has worked closely with the HSE to implement a number of international research, applied and educational projects, while Prof. Becker himself has spoken at the HSE as a guest lecturer on several occasions.
A considerable part of the session schedule was related to the organization of the educational process at the HSE for the next academic year. In particular, the Academic Council members approved the HSE’s standards for undergraduate studies in Political Science, Advertising and PR, Philology and some profiles of Economics and Management. ‘The development of our own standards in a specific profile is not just an internal matter for the HSE”, HSE Vice Rector Sergey Roshchin explained, “This is a signal which we send to the outside environment and it is about how important it is to organize the preparation of the appropriate educational programmes’.
Sergey Roshchin called another document which was presented to the consideration of the Academic Council members a ‘logical continuation’ of this work. This is a draft of the standards for master’s programme. The discussion of mutual approaches to the creation of these standards took place at an external seminar with the participation of heads of the university’s postgraduate programmes. ‘We managed to approach the development of our own Master’s standards even more systematically than the undergraduate ones, Sergey Roshchin said “From the very beginning we wanted to develop a joint framework for this process, but we also had a supertask – to create a unified competency classifier which would allow us to measure and evaluate the quality of execution of those standards more clearly. In addition to this, the unified classifier solves the problem of description and correlation of our competencies with the so-called ‘Dublin descriptors’ which are used by the European universities as part of the Bologna process’.
The members of the Academic Council also approved some changes to the university structure. At the Faculty of Economics a department of vocational training has been created which has close connections to KPMG – an international company network which provide audit, taxation and consulting services. The Faculty of Economics and KPMG have been working together for the past two years through an agreement allowing HSE students to receive practical training and employment in the company’s offices. The structure of the Faculty of Economics will also include a Laboratory of Macrostructure Modeling of the Russian Economy, which previously operated under the HSE Center for Fundamental Studies.
A new Department of Applied Linguistics and Intercultural Communication has been created at the HSE Nizhny Novgorod branch. In particular, it will work with the unique ‘Austrian Library’ (over six thousand volumes on human sciences) at the branch as part of an international project for the Austrian Ministry for International Affairs.
The HSE will enter the next academic year with two new institutes. The creation of an Institute of Transport Economics and Policy is the next stage of the HSE’s accession to the market of educational, analytical and expert services in the area of urban studies and spatial planning. The Institute will be headed by one of the most renowned Russian experts on transport problems, Mikhail Blinkin.
The HSE plans to open another institute – the International Institute of Management and Business – in conjunction with ESCP Europe business school. The institute aims to work in the market of continuing education and to implement both short-term programmes and the MEB (Master in European Business) programme.
Oleg Seregin, HSE News Service