Dear Colleague, please, have a look at these messages on a recent dramatic event concerning the Russian Academy of Sciences. You might send a solidarity expression to: "Procesi, Claudio" procesi@mat.uniroma1.it, and/or om@ras.ru, and/or universitas_in_trasformazione@mail.dm.unipi.it. Kind regards. Giulio Maier
COPY: Moscow, June 29, 2013
Dear Professor Procesi
On Thursday, June 27, 2013 the Russian Government unexpectedly discussed and approved the draft law on liquidation of the Russian Academy of Sciences founded in 1725 and on creating on its basis a new public organization. All the existing institutions of our Academy are offered to move away from the new organization, to subordinate them to a special administrative Government agency, and to subject to a selection compliant with certain conditions defined solely by this agency. A very negative experience of such a selection made by Government officials was demonstrated last fall during monitoring of the educational institutions in Russia. Many popular and highly reputed universities have been declared ineffective according to the rules that in fact have little to do with assessing real scientific level.
Another unpleasant aspect of this situation is that the draft law, which fundamentally changes the system of science organization in Russia, has been prepared and examined without discussion with the scientific community. Even the public structures created by the Ministry of Education and Science for consultations with the representatives of the scientific community have not been involved in a discussion of the draft law and have not been informed on its existence. The Academy also has not been informed on the existence of the project.
This law has already been submitted to the Parliament of the Russian Federation and is asked to be approved on the next week. After the acceptance of this law, a liquidation process of the Academy should be completed within three months.
We ask you to express your opinion about the destruction of the Russian Academy of Sciences. You can send it to the address of the Department of Mathematics of the Academy (with a copy to us) om@ras.ru. Unfortunately, the matter is urgent.
We would be very grateful for your support in this difficult for science in Russia time.
A. N. Parshin, V. L.Popov
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2013 18:45:50 +0200 Subject: RAS From: "Procesi, Claudio" procesi@mat.uniroma1.it
dear Colleagues, I received hundreds of replies to my letter, many containing useful information on the facts, comments etc.. I wish to point out that of course it is quite important to have a debate, disseminate information as a tool to take action, but clearly this has to be a collective effort. I am unable to handle all this, what I have done, with some non trivial work, has been to collect as best as possible, and probably with some mistakes, the names of the people who adhered to my letter and sent this information to Popov so he can inform the Academy.
But I see that some international debate on the issue has been generated. It seems to be clear, from some of the information we are getting, that some, even deep, reform of the RAS may be necessary, and it may even be the case that RAS is unable to reform itself from inside. This is not such an unheard story even in our academic system. The point is that when governments start such deep reforms on structures that are related to culture, science and education, it is not acceptable that such delicate decisions be taken without ample debate and involvement of scientists, academies and the like, in particular in such stringent times as to appear as pure coercion. In this case moreover there seem to be quite large economic interest (real estate), so that all kind of issues may be involved.
To do better than this it would be necessary to furnish ourselves with some tools, like the mailing list I proposed or better tools, which can help us to share information and create possible joint action, as a petition.
So ideas and actions from all of you are welcome
Claudio Procesi, Professore Emerito, Dipartimento di Matematica, G. Castelnuovo Membro dell'Accademia dei Lincei Università di Roma La Sapienza, piazzale A. Moro 00185, Roma, Italia fax 0039-06-44701007 http://www.mat.uniroma1.it/~procesi/
Giulio Maier Professor Emeritus of Structural Engineering Technical University (Politecnico) of Milan Department of Structural Engineering Piazza L. da Vinci, 32 20133 Milan (Italy) tel.: +39.02.2399.4221 fax: +39.02.2399.4220 e-mail: giulio.maier@polimi.it Web Pages: http://www.stru.polimi.it http://www.stru.polimi.it/IT/Personale.plp?showbook=completo&category=do...
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