RSGU freshmen meeting. Why did I leave

The university

Why did I leave

Column by Vilya Ayupov, a former student of the Russian State University for the Humanities, who voluntarily expelled from his university

Publication: 15/12/17

The other day, a turning point has come in my life - I have applied for resignation from my alma mater, the Russian State University for the Humanities. The decision was painful: mostly due to the fact that it is difficult to see and admit that you are right in yourself when you are alone, and social dogmas categorically state: if you do not receive a diploma, then ("smart"? "Successful"? "Intelligent"? ) a person from you, by and large, will not work. They are expressed in everything: from warnings from relatives to postscripts in vacancies “strictly higher. arr. ". Another reason for my doubts was that in the RSUH, despite all the complaints, of course, there is a good one, and there really is a feeling of a party, it helps to keep afloat. This feeling is most vividly manifested at a short two-minute distance from the metro to the main building, when you meet beautiful, cheerful, very different people and you understand that they are ours. But when you go inside, everything changes dramatically, and now I want to tell you why I decided to leave and what conclusions I drew from this.

In the public consciousness, the RSUH is assigned the role of a "liberal university" - along with a university, and it is not entirely clear what liberality means - either a conditional vector of pro-European political views that forms a university environment consistent with these views, or a teaching system based on humanistic values ​​and "Western" approaches, or the first and the second together. I will not write about the fact that "liberality" is an obvious simulacrum of post-Soviet Russia, a convenient and beautiful wrapper with completely arbitrary content. I just want to outline the very mythological nature of the "liberality" of my university - this is an illusion that I once led myself to and which it was difficult to part with. I emphasize that I cannot talk about the entire university at once, I studied only at IL (Institute of Linguistics), but I think that the situation at other faculties will not be very different.

In fact, it turned out that such a lack of regulation, the lack of clear standards and even a fixed time for passing the session turned against me ...

Everyone who has been to the RSUH is familiar with our shabby audiences, plaster falling from the ceiling, old chairs with unscrewed bolts - all this certainly creates a specific charm, especially if you keep in mind that the RSUH was created on the basis of Historical and Archival Institute... Say, yes, we have no money for a fashionable modern design interiors, but who has them now? But we create comfort and preserve what little remains of the past owners (by the way, the highest party school of the CPSU). A kind of intelligent cuisine, where everyone is different. I came here after completing a year at the HSE, hoping for exactly this - that the volume of study will not be so large and that the teachers and the dean's office will be able to show flexibility when, for example, my work schedule slightly overlaps with the teaching hours. I came because by the end of the first year of the FPL of the HSE (now FPL) I realized that I did not want to study linguistics-science, but I wanted to learn one of the Scandinavian languages, simultaneously mastering linguistics in the background. At the Russian State Humanitarian University, languages ​​are traditionally stronger and more hours are given for them, and that year there was just a set in Norwegian, so I decided that this was my chance. In fact, it turned out that such a lack of regulation, the lack of clear standards and even a fixed time for passing the session turned against me, but more on that later.

My first course took place without any particular turbulence zones. Yes, I was a little surprised that, for example, an employee of the dean's office could not give me a certificate, because “you know, I’m just not an expert on Excel, let’s wait for your colleague, and then we will resolve this issue”. Or what the introduction to computational linguistics course tells us about "cutting edge advances" that were relevant 40 years ago. It seemed to me insignificant, in the first semester I was mainly engaged in my own projects, since most of the disciplines were re-read, and I studied Norwegian. In the second semester, courses began in two fundamental disciplines - morphology and phonetics. They were read with high quality, the course of morphology was remembered by me using materials from relevant research, linguistic resources, as well as the loyalty of teachers and the adequacy of assignments at seminars and examinations.

But at the end of the session, a surprise awaited me. I qualified for summer school University of Oslo and on June 19 was supposed to fly away from Moscow for the whole summer. I warned all the teachers in advance, arranged for early exams, in particular with the teacher of the discrete mathematics course. The teacher, let's call him Ivan Ivanovich, promised me "excellent" in advance automatically - during the seminars I wrote several programs in Python that calculated various values, and even a short article on the application of the apparatus of predicate theory in linguistics. Ivan Ivanovich's course was peculiar - he had neither a program nor a textbook, he ignored requests to make at least an approximate list of references, literally kept silent when he was asked a direct question on this topic. I.I. he just came and told each couple what he considered appropriate at the moment. The exam was held in the form of a mini-project with cumulative assessment, I.I. suggested a topic, and in the course of completing the assignment gave points for answers, maximum five - i.e. "Great". Probably, mathematics for humanities can be taught like this, and Ivan Ivanovich's story was interesting, so I gladly participated in the seminars, which, by the way, were held in the first four pairs on Saturday.

Without false modesty, I will say that I was one of the most active participants in the course (if not the most), to which half of the stream did not go at all, and therefore what happened a week before departure plunged me into shock. I wrote to I.I. e-mail, and he said that the machine would not be installed for me, referring to the fact that I had not finalized one of the programs. I.I. I did not warn and before that assured me that the machine gun was provided to me. Time is short, I try to call I.I., ask for his phone number at the department, but they warn me with an ironic smile that there is no need to hope for his answer, because he does not answer the department either. I.I. does not take. The night before my last day in Moscow, he suddenly gets in touch and sends a topic for an oral exam, and I, swearing, do not sleep and get ready. The next day, after a two-hour discussion about Gödel's completeness theorem, I.I. delivered the verdict: "unsatisfactory", and sent me for a retake. Because I "did not describe its meaning in formal language." Yes, it may have been that way. But my doubts about the adequacy of I.I. then they grew so much that I decided in the fall to retake immediately with a commission.

You can't wait for help at the administration level, and students, unfortunately, are too inert to organize themselves and fight lawlessness and idiocy ...

Tyrant in education is, of course, not new and not that a huge rarity, even in good Western universities... The problem is not with them, they will always be, the problem is how the system is built - whether it is able to get rid of such "broken gears", whether it ignores them, or vice versa - it lives at their expense. Unfortunately, the latter turned out to be true at the Russian State Humanitarian University. The director of the institute, when I told her about the situation, only threw up her hands and said that she would not discuss her colleagues with me. On retake, I got three, I was offered a higher grade if I solve additional tasks, but I was so angry that I decided to finish the story with a course in discrete mathematics for myself.

In the second year, the situation became more difficult, partly due to the fact that I understood that no one would protect me here, and at the level of the administration you would not wait for help, and the students, unfortunately, are too inert to organize themselves and fight against lawlessness and idiocy. Partly - the quality of education seemed to me worse, and the approaches of the new teachers - more authoritarian and inadequate. One of the Norwegian teachers did not allow me to master the course offline, although I had just completed the textbook used in the group at the University of Oslo, and I had to copy everything I did in the summer like a blueprint (the other, however, was very loyal and allowed me to go according to an individual plan). On the course automatic translation we were presented with a system, which the author considered the most advanced development in the field for which the Ministry of Education is allocating grants, but for some reason she translated worse than a google translator, and her website with the design of the early 2000s worked only from the teacher's laptop - from ordinary computers flew out after a couple of minutes of use. The most unpleasant thing awaited me at the end - in the course of general semantics and lexicology.

After the lectures delivered by the famous linguist M.A.Krongauz, which, in my opinion, were quite good, the time has come for seminars. The teacher, let's call her Alexandra Alexandrovna, turned out to be a rather active and sharp-tongued woman who, in class, addressed me with such remarks: “It seems that Vil does not understand at all what connotation is”, “Vil, you amaze me”, and finally “ Vil, well, why are you silent, you have such a sharp destructive mind ”(quotes are almost accurate). A.A. warned that she was a tough teacher, and that no "excuses" would work with her - once she told a story about a girl whose parents died, and she asked to accept the answer, albeit prepared according to a different textbook, to which A.A. agreed, "I'm not a monster." “I hope everyone is now a little ashamed” - summed up AA.

It seemed funny to me until the time came for me to give a report on the article by the linguist R. Yakobson. On the first pair, A.A. told us about the semantic components of words that are responsible for the coherence of the text, together we put together a short story on the board for analysis. At the beginning of the second pair, she looked into the classroom and asked to finish the assignment, the group realized that it was necessary to finish on the blackboard, and someone volunteered to mark up the story written on it. After 15 minutes, she returned to the classroom, asked if we had finished, and then it turned out that, in her opinion, the task should have been rewritten by everyone in a notebook. She started shouting, shaming the students with the words “I have already unlearned my studies, I am writing this for whom,” and then decided to check our notes. Tearing my notebook out of her hands, she found that I had not marked out the text in it, said in a raised voice: "Ayupov - minus fifty points" and made a corresponding note in the group's list. In the RSUH there is a point system, and for a course you can get a maximum of 100, and 50 is a three, in my opinion, the lower limit. After distributing and checking the others' notebooks, she sat down on a chair and, with the words "well, come on, go," summoned me to read the report.

Throughout the report, A.A. She defiantly sat with her back to me, staring at the phone, and periodically turned around at me, noting out loud that I knew nothing about this or that area of ​​linguistics. The very content of her criticism was also discouraging, since A.A. operated on ideas about linguistics from a school textbook, arguing, for example, that in Russian there are precisely prefixes, suffixes and endings, and categorically rejecting the more modern paradigm of linguistic morphology that I used, in which the difference between a suffix, an ending and a prefix seems vague, and it is customary to use the term "affix" or suffix / prefix to indicate the position of a morpheme in a word. As it turned out later, A.A. almost nothing is known. I left the pair with shaking hands. At the rate, I asked for a top three automatically - such a possibility was announced at the beginning, but A.A. for some reason she insisted on sending me to the exam, "now Maxim Anisimovich will come and you will probably answer perfectly well." I refused.

My column is already overloaded with details about cases of unfair and inadequate treatment of students, there were much more of them, there is nothing to fit here. I just want to briefly summarize the events since the end of the second year summer session. The dean's office almost expelled me for academic failure, without warning me that I urgently needed to finish the academic difference (without even warning who, to what date and to what extent). I would have excluded it if I hadn't accidentally gone there on another issue. Instead of a translation school in the Moscow suburbs, where I hardly selected, I was obliged to do an internship at the dean's office at that time - to rewrite some numbers from one paper to another. It was not possible to go to school. In the third year, disciplines are read that are topical at best, 1975, and the new Norwegian teacher spreads rot on students, literally brings them to stuttering with questions, "What, the assignment does not need to be done entirely?", "Don't you remember the translation?" and gives students half-hour gaps about being late for classes without warning or getting "not good grades." In general, by October I realized that I no longer had the strength to endure it, and decided to leave.

If the university turns into Army 2.0, where instead of painting the grass green, you retell the teacher his course on the exam, realizing that there is no point in this knowledge, and often having more relevant information, then why do we still condemn those who refused this senseless burden?

Probably, I would have stayed if I had still burned in linguistics as I did in the first semester of the first year in HSE. Finished my studies, I would have gone to a magistracy in Germany and forgot everything like a bad dream. But not a trace of that fire was left for a long time, and if it started to burn a little bit again on some interesting pairs, it was very quickly flooded with a hail of authoritarianism, tyranny and lawlessness. Now there is nothing left there, even from my favorite Norwegian - zilch. Perhaps I am arrogant, but I do not understand what these people, who are stuck either in the past or in their patriarchal-authoritarian stereotypes about what teaching in higher education is, can teach me. It is especially painful to see this in the light of the fact that I myself have been teaching for the fifth year and I know perfectly well how it works from the other side and that there is no excuse for such behavior.

Frankly, I partly use the right given to me by Doksa's editors to speak out (by the way, I express my deep gratitude to them for this) in order to close the gestalt, call the evil that happened to me evil and maybe even draw the attention of the faculty administration to all this. Being inside the system, depending on these people, I could not publish my text. But, I think, from the column it becomes clear that the administration, if it does not care, will not apply any drastic measures in any case. And then, I do not at all deny the good things that were undoubtedly at the RSUH - I am grateful to those professional and adequate teachers whom I knew, and, whenever possible, I try to stay in touch. But, unfortunately, there was much more simply bad. And, in the end, there was so much that there was no strength left to continue.

Now the question for me is not why it happened, and not even how to change it - there are suspicions that so far this is possible only through an initiative from above. My question is different: why do we, people of the 20-year-old generation, continue to believe that it is necessary to get a "crust" and think of people without it as, in a sense, intellectual failures? I may be wrong here, and I hope I am wrong, but I hear such opinions everywhere almost every day. If the university turns into Army 2.0, where instead of painting the grass green, you retell the teacher his course on the exam, realizing that there is no point in this knowledge, and often having more relevant information, then why do we still condemn those who refused this senseless burden?

My story is not at all unique - I am sure that most students are in the same state. Russian universities who reflect at least a little about what is happening in their universities. And I am very sad that “everyone understands everything”, but no one ever “takes dirty linen out of public”. I am very proud and friendly envy of the HSE student community, but I think this is rather an exception.

WELCOME TO RSUH, DEAR FRIENDS!

It is a great honor for you! You have become students of one of the best humanitarian universities in Russia - Russian State University for the Humanities! From now on, you are a part of our big student family... We are proud of you and wish you creative and scientific victories!

Student life is full of worries and worries. The difficulties that you had to overcome during admission are only the beginning of a difficult, but interesting path to the heights of education. But, believe me, there is no time more beautiful than the student time. You will study with the best professors and teachers, whose books and works are read all over the world, acquaintance with the achievements of leading scientific schools, work in scientific centers and museums. You will gain skills and knowledge that will help you become the best specialists, and eventually join the world of the scientific and cultural elite.

We hope that you will take full advantage of the wide opportunities that are provided to you at our University, and become truly highly educated people, will actively participate in the life of the university. The team will do everything so that your student life is not limited only to educational activities. We will help you to actively participate in the life of the university, to realize your creative, intellectual and sports potential.

The doors to the RSUH have opened before you - welcome!

Freshman's Guide

The Freshman's Guide contains information that every student of the Russian State University for the Humanities needs. Please read it carefully.

A few tips to help you survive for 4 years (or even more) at the RSUH.

1. You can get to RGGU through two entrances - the main one (from Chayanova street) and the entrance from Miusskaya square. The main one is convenient to use if you need to get a pair in the 6 or 7 buildings, and the other - if you need to go to 1, 2, 5 and God knows which building.

2. In the main building (6th), you can hand over your outerwear wardrobe, but the RGGU grandmothers, cloakroom attendants, have their own fad - they do not take clothes without eyelets, so before handing over your jacket, it is better to check if you have the same cherished eyelet sewn on. They can, of course, forgive you for the first time, but you will have to listen to a portion of grumbles. Packages and bags cannot be returned - better and do not try.

3. It happens that you need to print something (diploma, course, materials for the seminar, etc.), for this you need to go to the department paid services... It is located in the main building on the 6th floor - go up and go right. Copiers installed in some cases do not work in most cases.

4. If there is a queue for elevators in the main building, you can try to leave by another - you will find it if you go to the right along the corridor to the end. True, for some reason that elevator does not go to the 5th floor, and if you click on the 6th floor, it will bring you to the exhibition hall (lectures are sometimes held there, and there is a cool picture where a girl is talking with a humanoid horse about something breathtakingly cheerful ).

6. You can order books through the website of the scientific library in the electronic catalog section. To log into your account, you need to indicate your last name and library card number (on the barcode on your student card).

7. It is better to hand over books on time. With a book that is at least a day out of date, the student is automatically blacklisted and can no longer take other books, enter the library and the computer class. Plus, for each overdue day, 6 rubles of debt drips. But the most important thing is that if a student comes to confess, the library staff will spit, swear and promise the unfortunate punishment from heaven.

8. If the book is overdue for a long time, and it seems to you that it is possible to write a diploma without going to the library (glory to the Internet!), Then you can take the risk and drag on until the last - namely, until the days of forgiveness. They are announced in May for all graduates - if you turn in the book on one of these days, you will not have to pay the debt. In general, on these days in May, you can witness the writing off of rather large debts - 5 and more thousand rubles! And as soon as the budget of the RSUH does without this money, it would be possible to repair a couple of buildings ...

9. The dining room can be accessed through the 2nd floor of the main building. It's almost like in a fairy tale - you go to the left, you come to the buffet. You will go to the right, you will find yourself in the canteen. Meals in the dining room are cheap and cheerful. For lunch, you can take lunch, it costs about 130-140 rubles - this is already cheap, cheerful, and often not very tasty.

10. In the vicinity of the university there are many places where you can eat - two Coffee House, Shokoladnitsa, Friday's, Teremok, two pizzerias, Mu-Mu, McDonald's, KFC, Yaposha, etc. It is more profitable and cheaper to eat with special offers - business lunches, During the break, many students walk to the grocery store - "Mongolia" (actually "Magnolia", but the nickname has already stuck).

11. Wi-Fi can be found in many parts of the RSUH, but the most constant one is on the 5th floor in the main building. Sometimes he works in the library and at the main auditorium (227) in building 7.

12. The point-rating system, according to which all marks are given at the RSUH, is designed to make life easier for students, but this is not always the case. Ideally, grades should be given according to the same scheme - several intermediate certifications and points for seminars, but in fact, each teacher distributes points in his own way. Someone gives a lot of points in seminars, someone - on control tests, and someone leaves all 100 points until the decisive exam. Because of this, it is best to learn from the very first lesson how and for what you can get points during the semester. This will make it easier to understand, strain at seminars, write an essay, or prepare for the first test. Plus, it's better to immediately find out whether automatic machines are possible and in what form to submit work - in writing, in print, for soap or dropbox, in doc or docx format (this is also very important!).

13. According to the point-rating system, you need to score only 50 out of 100 possible points for the top three. The mark “good” is already 68, and the mark “excellent” - 84. For a test without a mark, you need to earn, as well as for a three, at least 50 points.

15. Computers at the university are often old and infected with dozens of viruses, so save presentations and other documents in old versions of Word and Power Point (best of all in the 2003 version), otherwise the files may not open (it will be especially fun to defend your diploma), and do not forget to check then flash drives for viruses.

16. The most interesting events at the RSUH are the karaoke competition, KVN and the birthday of the university, at the last one you can grab a piece of a delicious cake.

17. If you are a boy and you play football well, join the faculty team. Bonuses: another reason to assign you an increased scholarship, a "respectable" reason to sometimes skip couples ("And I have a training session, tomorrow we will play with MGUs!"), The title of the best graduate "for success in sports" and a physical education machine.

18. The dormitory of the RSUH is not settled in the 1st year, and they warn about this immediately. In the first semester of the first year, there are really few chances of settling, but in the second semester they can already populate. Try to often call the eyes of those who settle in the hostel, go in and ask if there is a place / room.