Modern university as a corporation: a new role for traditional corporatism

The article falls under conceptual category. On the basis of theoretical work by native and foreign researchers, philosophers and sociologists the authors clarify the questions related to the notion of university corporate culture, its content and function. The accent is made on modern classical university corporate culture. The aim of the article is to provide arguments for historical changes in the university corporate culture content and demonstrate their relevance to the challenges of respective time periods. The reason behind writing this article is that we witness dramatic changes in university corporate culture leading to changes of its Idea and Mission. Transformation is seen in the growing amount of commercial initiatives. This implies a potential threat of losing academic and educational status of the university, replacing it by economic corporation. Such situation requires an explanation. The main methods of research are comparative and historical ones. They help answer the question on the time of university emergence in Russia and demonstrate that having been initiated by Lomonosov it appeared long before classical Western universities. These methods allowed for comparing the given historical models of classical universities, identify their general and specific characteristics and compare them with the criteria of modern university and its corporate culture. The conclusion (and the novelty of the author’s interpretation of university corporate culture) of such a comparison is as follows: pre - classic (medieval) and classical (XVIII - end of XX centuries) universities had university corporate culture included into professorial culture, whereas modern universities do not have that feature. Modern university so-cio - cultural basis includes two cultures: professorial and corporate. Both cultures have different functions. Function of the corporate culture is to upgrade university competitiveness at the international educational market. This can be seen in changed university discourse, which now includes such As nowadays university corporate culture plays an important role in its life, it can be included into the list of classical university criteria (alongside with fundatmenalization and humanitarization of education, its autonomy, lecturer cult, etc.). Seen from purely economic point of view it runs counter with rational classical criteria and that is where the danger for the university lies. At the same time as a new university criteria corporate culture is an answer to the challenges of a modern globalizing society. This discrepancy is as problem that should be solved. One of the directions for the solution can be inclusion of attention to cultural - anthropological portrait of students and graduates into the corporate culture content. We must pay attention to formation of such personal characteristics as trust, cooperation, support, etc. These traits can help mitigate emerging individualism, intolerance, depersonalization and the crash of multicultural attitude. The conclusions made in this article can be of importance for professors and students in their joint work, as well as for university administration.