Accountant on the voivodship

Dear editors !

In the last letter to my favorite newspaper, I suggested what would happen after the inauguration. And now I have to pay for this: colleagues in conversations tell me: well, you, Ivan, screwed up! He said that the Minister of Higher Education and Science will become Academician of Trubnikov, and it turned out in a completely different way: Mikhail Mikhailovich Kotyukov was appointed Minister of Science and Higher Education!

Imagine, they tell me colleagues, he came to Fano as a manager, who was supposed to free scientists from bureaucratic duties alien to him, engage in the inventory of property and all sorts of other boring affairs. And it was impossible to demand anything else from him, because he is a specialist in the financial part, a former employee of the Ministry of Finance, in fact an accountant.

And, Ivan, you just think about it, now it has been put at the head of the ministry, which should manage both science and higher education. Write regulatory documents, so to speak, set the rules of the game. And they will do this under the guidance of an accountant!

Imagine, colleagues say that the accountant was appointed commander of the army. He probably will be able to correctly organize the accounting of weapons and ammunition, to calculate what the supply according to the established standards should be, but what if you have to fight?! The defeat is provided: the governor does not understand anything in strategy or tactics!

As usual, such corridor thinkers think of themselves competent and intelligent, but do not understand simple things. The main of them, which I always talk about first: on top it is better to see what and how to do. But, of course, my colleagues are not ready to accept such a postulate, give them an explanation. Okay, I can explain.

Many liberals love to look around the West all the time. Well, then look at the United States: there are no ministries of science at all, and the Ministry of Education is headed by the daughter of a billionaire and a political activist. And nothing, no one suits scandals, everyone works fine.

The academician-minister is seemingly good, but we all know our academics: they are much to pull the blanket. And the Minister-Financialist is ideal in this regard, he is equivalent from everything: he is anthropomorphic nanobobits, which is giant accelerators, that artificial intelligence is all one, there is no interest. To determine the strategy and tactics of development, there is an Academy of Sciences, various kinds of tips, and the minister only must ensure that the mechanism for determining priorities works well and without failures.

And nothing bad will happen to higher education due to the fact that Mikhail Mikhailovich does not really understand this area. Again, I am not about the fact that my native university does not obey the ministry, I am about the fact that in the field of higher education we have structures, the authoritative opinion of which the new minister can always lean.

First of all, this is the Russian Council of rector, led by such a titan as Viktor Antonovich Sadovnichy. The most powerful structure, a real intellectual center! And if somewhere Mikhail Mikhailovich is mistaken, he will be corrected, they will help him.

Finally, I want to say about the regulatory framework. Colleagues, do you think that Olga Yuryevna or Dmitry Viktorovich themselves prepared projects of various documents? No, of course, the apparatus, officials that you scold all the time. And with the new purpose they will not disappear anywhere, they will continue to work, so everything is in order, there is no reason for concern.

I emphasize once again that the “accountant” does not have its supervalued ideas, he will not pull the blanket either towards science, or towards higher education. As a disciplined and state person, he will be guided not by personal tastes, but by state interests. Based on the opinion of the Russian Union of Rectors, on the opinion of the Russian Academy of Sciences, on the development of the Presidential Council on Science and Education. And, of course, he will act with the support of the President of Russia and the Prime Minister, sensitively perceiving their instructions and wishes. And this is the main guarantee that we will succeed!

Your Ivan Ekonomov