I will give you an example of Ohio University realizing a project of cooperation with 24 colleges and 13 state institutions of higher education, as a result of which the university became the largest in the US.

The main problem we faced was a lack of trust in each other. Each of the colleges and their faculty existed as, and considered itself to be, an individual family, indeed every ‘family’ distrusted the others. Therefore, it was necessary to create something uniting, like a central management network, that would eliminated this distrust and implement strict rules, common for all.

There were other problems too. Different colleges had different academic programs, with different content, and it was imperative to decide which content should equate to which course. It was necessary to decide what we needed to remove in order to have common standards.

Tomsk institutions of higher education have to answer a question — what does ‘collaboration’ mean? They have not yet formed a clear vision of cooperation. You have several promising areas for potential cooperation, and you should choose the ones of the greatest priority. Very specific actions must be taken to change the corporate culture of Tomsk universities.

It’s possible that you were driven off the course by the experience of Silicon Valley, which you consider to be an example. But don’t create illusions for yourselves, it’s not Disneyland! Real economies are extremely competitive and very complicated, especially in Russia. It’s necessary, therefore, to be very specific, set clear goals and work out actions for their achievement in order to successfully realize cooperation projects.

I strongly believe that it’s impossible to talk about uniting university cooperation in the area of educational services and cooperation in the sphere of academic research. In terms of academic research Tomsk has serious competitive advantages, but this is not linked to the educational integration of universities. It’s an entirely different thing. You need to cooperate not with each other, but look toward international academic research networks, and more intensively participate in international academic interaction. So far Russian academic papers are very rarely published in international journals in foreign languages — English, German, French. You need to introduce serious changes into this process.

Based on the presentation by J.Hawley and discussion at a seminar ‘Planning cooperation within the framework of the Consortium of Tomsk universities and research organizations’)