Like many of you, I constantly receive and read various materials devoted to the deplorable state of academic institutions and Russian science in general. I received one of the latest materials on this topic by email on December 2, 2015: five academicians at the “council of wise men” on November 30, 2015, discussing the problems of Russian science... For the sake of fairness, we need to pay attention to the serious mistakes and miscalculations that the Academy made, or rather, its Presidium in the period from 1991 to 2013.