Self-reform

Dear editors!

Older generation readers of the newspaper have not yet forgotten what the term “counter plan” means, but young readers need to be explained. When a plant was given a specific production plan, it could, guided by the spirit of socialist competition, take on increased obligations. This was a great initiative and I think we should use it more often now.

Take the plans for reforming academic science. The state has put forward proposals for the reorganization of state academies, and their management and employees must develop their own counter plan for reform. Of course, I’m just an outside observer here, but I’m an experienced and intelligent observer, and therefore I can offer my colleagues some thoughts about the self-reform plan.

So, the key issue is property, land and real estate. First. The lands of the Agricultural Academy must be abandoned. The land must serve the people: cottages and shopping and entertainment complexes must be built on it, and peasant tractors must plow it. And agricultural academicians can conduct experiments on their own plots, if science is so dear to them. You might think that millions of hectares of land are needed for experiments! All sorts of Mendels managed without such vast lands, and nothing - they made a complete contribution to science.

Second. Real estate and land plots in Moscow and the Moscow region - old mansions, large plots on Leninsky Prospekt and much more. Why all this, why old buildings that are not particularly convenient for doing science, why plots of land in prestigious places? And in the Moscow region, the Academy has a lot of things, oh, a lot. It is necessary to transfer all these sites and buildings to effective managers and anti-crisis managers, let them sell them and rent them out to businessmen. And with part of the money raised from this, it is possible to build a science park of the Russian Academy of Sciences, unprecedented in the world in terms of concentration of minds. Like the Novosibirsk Academy Town, only an order of magnitude more powerful!

Of course, it’s not worth demanding a very large part of the proceeds for the golden mile: it’s not easy for the state now, the economy is stagnating, so you need to be more modest in your requests. The site should be looked at not in New Moscow or near it, but somewhere in the Tula or Kaluga region, where land is cheaper. And pack everything compactly in this area. So that the unprecedented density of scientists per square meter gives a colossal synergistic effect, so that physicists, chemists, biologists and mathematicians, jostling in line to enter the park, give birth to the most creative interdisciplinary ideas. And those around them, having heard the conversations of their neighbors, were inspired and generated their own ideas.

In general, so that ideas spread in line like the flu virus in the subway during rush hour! In such a creative environment, we have the right to expect that in terms of scientific output, the RAS Science Park will surpass not only Skolkovo and Kurchatnik, but also the world’s leading centers.

This, of course, is not all: it is also necessary to take a number of measures to absolutely save everything in order to increase the economic efficiency of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Reduce the cost of remuneration for scientific workers by half - they already satisfy their curiosity at public expense, and you shouldn’t count on large salaries. Reduce the cost of purchasing instruments, office equipment, and consumables by half - focus on the theoretical understanding of reality, mathematical modeling, and thinking about changing the scientific paradigm. In the end, Mikhail Valentinovich does a good job with the paradigm, and we should be inspired by this example.

By the way, if we're talking about Mikhail Valentinovich. It is necessary to immediately give him all those institutes that he wants to take to Kurchatnik, immediately! It is extremely stupid to prevent him from creating a distributed research meta-center with mega-installations out of empty stubbornness, thus irritating the country’s leadership. And not only give away the institutes, but also throw in some money: create a development fund for the Kurchatov Institute named after Kovalchuk, to which all RAS employees will have to transfer their salaries for the last three months of this year. Otherwise, they might open a science park not in the Tula region, but somewhere near Magadan...

Yours Ivan Ekonomov