Book chapter
"Свобода обучения" versus "создание новой породы"
In book
The article examines the status system of the local academic community of St. Petersburg sociologists. The list of most cited authors was obtained from citation analysis of selected Russian sociological journals. The results suggest that the status system is divided in isolated segments with few citation exchanges between different segments. Each part of the sociological community produces its own list of influentials. With a few exceptions there are no authors central for the whole community. Even the embeddedness of various segments in the same local space does not stimulate circulation of attention between different parts of the community.
During its two-hundred-year history, Kazan University has witnessed various events and changes with regard to the history of both world scientific evolution and political developments in Russia. They have been peculiarly reflected locally, yielding a unique blend of the concept of the university as a producer, keeper and translator of the universally accepted set of knowledge, on the one hand, and perceptions of Russian authorities and public regarding the real-life need of the country in trained specialists and desire to have information about the "Eastern" region of the Russian Empire, on the other.
Leo Tolstoy and Max Weber on value neutrality of university research The problem of value neutrality of science is considered on the basis of works by Leo Tolstoy and Max Weber. In the first part of the article, the statements on the value neutrality of scientific knowledge and university teaching by Weber and Tolstoy are made explicit and analyzed in a comparative perspective. In the second part, the central problem of Tolstoy and Weber, that is, a rational choice of the value paradigm, is studied systematically. Differences in their assumptions and conclusions are shown. In the third part, a historical commentary to the context of Tolstoys and Webers works is given. The works are treated as episodes in a wider modern history of the value neutralization of the scientific knowledge and university teaching. The specifics of this process are tightly connected with the fundamental principles of the modern research university (the Humboldtian model of university).