Academics rally to the defense of a Moscow college stripped of its state accreditation

More than 230 academics from Russia and other countries have signed an open letter calling on Russia’s Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency (Rosobrnadzor) to reconsider its decision to revoke the state accreditation of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, better known as “Shaninka.” The letter describes the school as one of Russia’s leading humanities colleges and argues that the code violations discovered by inspectors can be addressed easily without any regulatory penalty.

The list of signatures includes Dmitry Zimin, the honorary president of the telecommunications company VimpelCom and the founder of the “Dynasty” private scientific research fund, which closed in 2015 after Russia’s Justice Ministry designated it as a “foreign agent.”

On June 21, 2018, Rosobrnadzor announced that it had revoked Shaninka’s state accreditation, after a planned inspection uncovered “multiple violations of education standards.” In 2016, the same agency withdrew the education license of the European University in St. Petersburg — another leading school in the humanities.