Institute of Education

Purpose. This exploratory study aims, firstly, to analyse and categorise judgments on the ethical behaviour and actual behaviour of university educators. Secondly, the study addresses the impact of demographic data, such as gender, age, and role on these issues.

Approach. We utilised online survey data from academic employees of four leading universities in Russia, who are involved in teaching activities. In this study, we used correlation, regression and factor analyses.

Findings. Our results demonstrate that teaching while too distressed to be effective, is a common experience among university educators. By contrast, the rarest categories include teaching under the influence of drugs or alcohol. In addition, there is a high congruence between beliefs and respective behaviours. Females are typically more ethical in both judgements and actual behaviour. Factor analysis of behaviours yielded 16 interpretable factors.

Originality. This study contributed to the very limited research on the ethical aspects of higher education in Russia.

Practical implications. Firstly, the salary of the university educators should be adequate and competitive and match with their workload. Secondly, the work of the educators should be given recognition that may become their stimuli for improvement in university teaching. Thirdly, universities should develop ethics centres, which help faculty members and students to take the right decisions in situations involving questionable behaviour in the classroom. Lastly, the development of ethical codes, for faculty members and students, may become their guidance in situations with ethical dilemmas.

This chapter examines the characteristics of high- and low-performing schools in disadvantaged areas of rural Russia. It first provides a historical context of the persistent spatial inequalities that differentially shape opportunities for rural youth, with a specific focus on the differences in academic outcomes and opportunities for rural and urban graduates. The last section of the chapter describes a qualitative study conducted in rural schools in two very different regions of the Russian Federation: the Tomsk Oblast region and the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). A wide range of factors, including school characteristics, family, environment, as well as individual knowledge and experiences, shape school experiences. The chapter identifies effective and ineffective practices used by schools and educational leaders within disadvantaged rural communities but notes that, in the context of rural depopulation and economic decline, “effective” education that enables young people to take advantage of largely urban opportunities may simply hasten the decline and abandonment of rural villages.

This paper explores the black box behind efficiency measurements in higher education and define the determinants of university efficiency. Particularly, it investigates how the efficiency of universities is affected by the characteristics of the territory in which they operate. We propose an analysis that combines two perspectives: 1) the resource dependence theory, suggesting that the location of university can determine the amount of resources available to it; 2) institutional isomorphism, according to which the characteristics of other higher education institutions located in the same area may shape the university production function and the efficiency of its operations. In order to test this framework we use the data on Russian universities and non-parametric conditional order-m efficiency estimator with two categories of exogenous variables. The first group includes the social, economic and cultural characteristics of the region where the university is located. The second set includes the characteristics of other higher education institutions located in the same region. Our findings highlight that the managerial efficiency of universities is strongly associated with the characteristics of the environment in which they operate