On August 10, 2018, Rosobrnadzor, the Federal Service for Supervision in Education and Science, finally issued its order No. 1140, granting a new teaching license to the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP). The University was granted the right to implement all graduate and postgraduate programs for which it applied in the fields of anthropology, art history, economics, history, philosophy, political science, and sociology. EUSP’s primary concern is to re-enroll those students forced to suspend their MA studies due to the revocation of the license. The University now also has the opportunity to announce a new call for applications and admit first-year students for its Master's programs in the social sciences and humanities.
The European University lost its educational license in August 2017. After a long period of unsuccessful litigations with Rosobrnadzor, the University’s license was revoked. The dispute with Rosobrnadzor started following an unscheduled inspection conducted in July 2016, upon the complaint of the notorious Vitaly Milonov, then a member of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg.
The inspection revealed more than 120 formal violations in the activities of the University. The number of these violations was later reduced to just four requirements, which the European University allegedly did not fulfill: an insufficient number of faculty whose primary occupation was practical work in the field of sociology and political science, the absence of a gym, and the incomplete certification of some university professors.
The absence of both an effective dialogue with Rosobrnadzor and any formal procedures for resolving the situation led to the suspension of the EUSP educational license in December 2017. The University managed to defend its license in the Arbitration Court of Moscow. Nevertheless, Rosobrnadzor appealed to the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast in late December, 2017. The court upheld the arguments of Rosobrnadzor despite the fact that all four requirements against EUSP had by that time already been met. The decision to revoke the educational license was made on March 20, 2017.
With the help of professional lawyers from "SSP-Consult", the University appealed to the Arbitration Court of Moscow to contest the order and actions of Rosobrnadzor. The Court agreed to temporarily suspend the revocation of the license in order to allow the students to complete their academic year. However, the University failed to defend its legal positions within the framework of subsequent judicial processes.
After completing the academic year in the summer of 2017, the University made a difficult decision to put an end to the unpromising litigation, with the aim of quickly restoring its right to conduct educational activities, by applying for a new license. Unfortunately, the licensing procedure dragged on for an entire year. The EUSP applied for the license three times: in one case, Rosobrnadzor refused to accept the application, and then turned it down twice. New queries were raised against the University, this time from a member of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg Andrei Anokhin. The University management has no doubt that its rights guaranteed by the Federal Law 294-FZ were violated in the course of these inspections.
Despite these challenges, the EUSP has continued to enjoy significant public support from the Russian Presidential Council for Science and Education, the Council for Science in the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, the St. Petersburg Council of Rectors, the Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the founders and trustees of the University, leading Russian and foreign universities, members of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, alumni, students, EUSP professors, journalists, and all those who deeply concerned for and interested in the fate and integrity of the EUSP. Furthermore, both President Putin and Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets support the EUSP and its mission.
As of today, after more than a year of legal and institutional uncertainty, the EUSP has finally restored its educational license. Throughout this challenging time, the university professors were deprived of the right to teach, and its students were forced to look for temporary educational opportunities at other universities. Despite the pressure, the faculty and staff of the EUSP have done everything in their power to use this forced sabbatical to further the advancement of continued research, publication, and education. We remain confident that the EUSP will compensate for these losses by increasing the number of its publications, securing a higher place in Russian and international citation indexes, and garnering wider popularity and public support overall. Needless to say, the EUSP has learned much from this experience, which has only served to strengthen its conviction that excessively formalistic and bureaucratic state regulation of higher education ultimately hinders its development, and that this problem can only be solved through the committed and concerted efforts of the wider academic community.