ON THE ISSUE OF THE LEVEL OF REMUNERATION FOR ACADEMIC AND TEACHING WORK IN HIGHER EDUCATION

B. A. Rybin

Scientific and technological progress and education, including higher education, mutually influence one another. Therefore, as one of the main tasks facing higher education, the 24th Congress of the CPSU put forward: “To develop higher and secondary education in accordance with the requirements of scientific and technological progress, to raise the quality of training and to improve the ideological and political education of future specialists”¹.

Improving the quality of specialist training depends above all on the conditions under which their training is carried out. The concept of the labor process and of its components (labor itself, the means of labor, and the objects of labor), substantiated by K. Marx with reference to the sphere of material production, may, with a certain degree of qualification, also be transferred to the nonproductive sphere, in particular to higher education. Here, labor itself should be understood as the activity of academic and teaching personnel and of educational support staff who provide instruction. The labor of academic and teaching workers belongs to that kind of labor which, in K. Marx’s words, “...produces, forms, develops, preserves, and reproduces labor power itself”². The means of labor here are the material and technical base of higher education, while the distinctive object of labor is the students. There exists an objective connection among all the indicated components, on the basis of which the corresponding proportions are established. The quality of graduating specialists and the amount of expenditure on their education depend to a great extent on these proportions. The number and qualification composition of academic and teaching personnel are of decisive importance for raising the quality of specialist training.

Although the number of the most highly qualified instructors—those possessing academic degrees and titles—has increased in recent years, their share within the teaching staff has not increased, but has decreased. For example, in the higher educational institutions of the RSFSR, the total number of faculty members over the period 1958–1968 increased from 71 thousand to 127.8 thousand persons, or by 80%; at the same time, the number of Doctors of Sciences increased by only 29%, and Candidates of Sciences by 44%. The share of academic and teaching workers holding academic degrees declined from 43% in 1959 to 35.3% in 1967. There were 3,467 persons holding the academic title of professor, or 29.5%, and 5,984 persons holding that of docent (51%); the remainder had neither

academic ranks, or the academic degrees of doctor or candidate of sciences. Among senior instructors, who make up 35% of all faculty in higher educational institutions, only 9.8% hold the academic degree of candidate of sciences.^3

Such a change in the qualitative composition is due both to the growth in the number of scientific-pedagogical workers and to the difficulties of recruiting personnel for higher education. Thus, speaking at a meeting of the rectors of all universities, the Minister of Higher and Secondary Specialized Education of the USSR, V. P. Elyutin, noted: “...we have quite a few examples when university graduates do not want to become instructors in higher educational institutions...”^4

One of the reasons for this situation, it seems, lies in the disorderliness of wages and, above all, of their minimum level. An analysis of this reason compels us to take a deeper look at the content and character of scientific-pedagogical labor.

When considering scientific-pedagogical labor “irrespective of any particular social form,”^5 its duality is revealed—as scientific labor and pedagogical labor, which differ in their target functions: the first is directed toward the production of new knowledge, the discovery of new laws of nature, society, and thought, and their use in practice; the second, toward reproducing and transmitting them to students. Such duality in goal-orientation is one of the most important specific features of scientific-pedagogical labor.

However, such an approach to characterizing scientific-pedagogical labor meets with an objection on the grounds that all labor in any sphere of activity includes both elements of the productive and of the reproductive, and this is especially true of mental labor, which by their nature both components of scientific-pedagogical labor are.^6 Indeed, all labor, including scientific labor, has the character of “universality.” “Universal labor,” K. Marx pointed out, “is all scientific labor, every scientific discovery, every invention. It is conditioned partly by the cooperation of contemporaries, partly by the utilization of the labor of predecessors.”^7 But scientific labor is connected not so much with the use of already known variants of solving a problem as with the search for new methods of solving a new task; as that task is solved, the scientific worker switches to solving another. The assumed repetition of known operations and the use of the experience of predecessors is only the initial moment for obtaining new knowledge. Beyond the limits of known experience, creativity begins, for all existing knowledge and modes of action are insufficient, although they are necessary for attaining a new goal, for satisfying a new need. Therefore people, having become aware of the task before them, are compelled to develop a new mode of action, new techniques and methods that until then had remained outside people’s field of vision, by means of which the goal they have set is achieved. All this gives scientific labor a creative character.

Here it is necessary to emphasize that we are speaking of the creative character of the labor itself, and not of a creative attitude toward labor. There is a distinction between these two concepts. The latter is possible in any type of human activity and is characterized by the personal attitude

^3 V. E. Komarov, Economic Problems of the Training and Utilization of Specialist Personnel. Moscow, 1972, pp. 96–97.
^4 Vestnik vysshei shkoly, 1972, No. 10, p. 11.
^5 K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 23, p. 188.
^6 “Sociology and Higher Education,” part II (Scientific Notes of Gorky State University, issue 100). Gorky, 1970, p. 134.
^7 K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 25, part 1, p. 116.

of a person toward labor duties. Only in this sense does the frequently encountered assertion that all labor under socialism has a creative character have a right to exist. It would be more correct and more precise to speak of a creative, i.e., conscious, attitude toward labor, of an interest in labor, of the striving to improve it, and so on. All this, in contrast to capitalism, becomes possible only under the dominance of socialist production relations and reflects the subjective attitude of the worker, including the scientific worker, toward the very process of labor. The creative character of labor is an objective phenomenon, independent of the prevailing production relations, inherent in various socioeconomic formations. In other words, creative character lies on the side of labor itself, while the creative attitude lies on the side of the individual, the worker.

This conclusion has a direct bearing on the specific character of remuneration for scientific labor.

As is known, society recognizes as justified a worker’s right to participate in the distribution of the fund of individual consumption only when the result of his labor is recognized as socially useful, socially significant. Scientific labor, being exploratory and creative, is probabilistic in character, i.e., its result and social significance at any given moment can be represented only very approximately or in a general way. But without violating the unified principles of distribution and taking into account the high efficiency of the sphere of scientific labor as a whole, society in this case, too, admits each specific representative of such labor to the distribution of the fund of individual consumption. Thus, even before the receipt of a concrete result, it recognizes his labor as socially useful and socially significant. But such recognition is rather formal than substantive in character.

Since, for participation in distribution, formal recognition of the result becomes decisive, an external form of its expression must also be found. If one takes into account that, out of 927.7 thousand scientific workers in the USSR in 1970, 248.1 thousand persons held the academic degrees of doctor and candidate of sciences, then it is evident that society sees the determining principle in the recognition of labor as scientific in the possession by the corresponding worker of higher education and in his activity within the framework of a scientific organization.

The creative character of the labor of a scientific worker imparts specificity also to the determination of the measure of his consumption. The measure of consumption not only establishes a direct connection between the fund of individual consumption and the worker’s share in it; it is also intended to ensure the normal course of reproduction of concrete labor. Consequently, by its nature the measure of consumption cannot be the same for different kinds of concrete labor, since the maintenance and development of the capacity for labor require, in different kinds of activity, different expenditures and different ways of carrying them out.

In any other activity, the quantitative characteristic of the measure of consumption is, to a certain extent, predetermined by the conditions of repetition, by the free possibility of reproduction.

The creative character, by giving scientific labor the features of uniqueness and unrepeatability, compels one to assign scientific labor to the category of activities that are not freely reproducible and that possess an element of economic monopoly. This means that the measure of consumption of scientific labor must be independent of the conditions of repetition. In such a case, the criterion for assessing the measure of consumption of scientific labor can only be such a volume of consumption as allows the scientific worker to devote his abilities precisely to this type of activity. In other words, the measure of consumption established for him by society must be no less than any other applied to freely reproducible activit—

ness. Violation of this criterion may cause, and indeed does cause, some research workers to switch to performing work that does not require the knowledge and abilities they possess.

Setting the lower boundary of remuneration at the level of highly skilled but freely reproducible labor serves, as it were, as an objective base by reference to which society is able, proceeding from the concrete needs of the place, time, and type of scientific activity, to make the necessary deviations in one direction or another. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that any significant deviations from this boundary cannot be justified when establishing the rates of basic pay. This limitation follows from the fact that society permits any labor to participate in distribution if, merely by formal criteria, it is recognized as scientific.

An indirect assessment of the lower boundary of the measure of consumption of scientific labor proper is also important in determining this boundary for scientific-pedagogical labor.

“The distinguishing feature of higher education,” as S. I. Zinoviev rightly notes, “is above all its scientific completeness, a certain finished character as applied to the range of disciplines that are determined by the specialty. If in secondary school the ‘fundamentals of the sciences’ are studied, then in higher education students study one or another branch of knowledge on a broad general-theoretical basis, with sufficient completeness ultimately corresponding to the requirements of practice.”³ Consequently, the “scientific completeness, a certain finished character... of the disciplines determined by the specialty” can be provided only by those teachers who themselves are engaged in research in the field of science that they teach as a discipline. The need for this kind of teacher in higher education is confirmed by the entire course of improvement of the educational process.

Modern society and its production are no longer satisfied by a specialist who possesses a large store of knowledge but is able to work only according to a model. Among the chief values of the specialist, what has come especially to the fore is his creative activity, the ability to think creatively, the capacity to work under conditions of the continuous progress of science and technology, the ability to orient oneself in the avalanche of contemporary knowledge and actively make use of it. Therefore, in higher education, alongside the so-called explanatory type of instruction, which assigns the main place to the informational communication of knowledge and to exercises according to instructions and examples, the problem-based type of instruction is increasingly making its way; by its nature it most closely approximates scientific research. In problem-based instruction, the main attention is devoted to organizing the independent acquisition of knowledge by students. They receive knowledge not in ready-made form, but must, under the guidance of the instructor, discover it, i.e., act as the “first discoverers” of truth. The most developed form of problem-based instruction is students’ scientific-research work. “The merits of problem-based instruction,” writes I. V. Shvarts, “are indisputable, but it should be borne in mind that it requires of the instructor an understanding of the psychological foundations of didactics, the ability to penetrate the ‘holy of holies’—the ‘black box’—of the cognitive process. Problem-based instruction presupposes a high level of the instructor’s pedagogical technique, the art of applying the entire arsenal of means of problem-based instruction.”⁴

Thus, the problematic character of the contemporary educational process reveals most clearly that scientific-pedagogical labor in higher education has a dialectical duality, manifested in the fact that, in the process of instruction, the problems of two completely opposite areas of knowledge are tied into a single knot: those of a specialized science (physics, chemistry, mathematics, etc.), possessing the highest degree of objectivity and independent of the human being, and those of the psyche of the learner, which is subject to its own particular regularities, studied by psychology and didactics. In other words, a higher-education teacher must be a research worker, while a research worker teaching one discipline or another must also be a pedagogue.

This conclusion is important for determining the lower boundary of the consumption measure of a scientific-pedagogical worker.

The lower boundary of the consumption measure for purely scientific labor, derived earlier by an indirect method, proves insufficient for a scientific-pedagogical worker, since it does not provide the latter with the maintenance of his capacities for pedagogical activity. Consequently, it must be substantially greater than the lower boundary of the consumption measure for a purely scientific worker, and likewise for a highly qualified but freely reproducible worker in the sphere of material production.

However, after the increase in wages at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s for workers in most branches of the national economy, a previously nonexistent problem arose: that of raising the wage level of a fairly numerous group of higher-education employees. As practice shows, the average wage of specialists with higher education already 2–3 years after graduation from a higher educational institution amounts to 120–130 rubles, and with a length of service of more than 5 years, as a rule, no less than 140–150 rubles. The average wage of all workers and employees in the national economy of the USSR grew over the period from 1950 to 1970 by 1.9 times and now exceeds by 16% the salary rate of an assistant at a higher educational institution with up to 5 years of scientific-pedagogical work experience. The acuteness of the problem may be judged, to a certain extent, from data on changes in the relationship between the sizes of official salaries of teachers without an academic degree and the average wage of all workers and employees.

The wage of workers and employees in the national economy of the USSR rose from 33.1 rubles in 1940 to 122 rubles in 1970 (by 367%). The monthly official salaries of teachers in higher educational institutions changed accordingly: for docents and senior teachers holding the academic degree of Candidate of Sciences—from 70 to 250 rubles (by 357%); for senior teachers and assistants without a degree—from 60 to 120 rubles (by 200%) and from 50 to 105 rubles (by 210%).⁵

If the official salaries of docents and senior teachers holding the academic degree of Candidate of Sciences are, in relation to the average monthly wage of workers and employees, at approximately the same level as in the prewar period, then the salaries of teachers without an academic degree have decreased: for senior teachers—by 46%, and for assistants—by 43%.

In order to retain in higher education a qualified assistant who conducts practical, laboratory, and seminar classes, higher-education practice has proceeded along the path of transferring him to the position of senior teacher, which already obliges him to lecture, something that to a considerable degree

affects the quality of instruction. It is precisely for this reason that the share of senior lecturers among the faculty, as was already indicated above, has risen to 35%, while only 9.8% of them held the academic degree of Candidate of Sciences.

Thus, the needs of the further development of higher education and of improving the quality of instruction of the specialists being trained require an increase in the official salary of higher-education employees who do not hold an academic degree.

1. Materials of the 24th Congress of the CPSU, Moscow, Politizdat, 1971, p. 277. ↩

2. K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 26, part 1, p. 154. ↩

3. S. I. Zinoviev, The Educational Process in the Soviet Higher School. Moscow, 1968, p. 72. ↩

4. I. E. Shvarts, “Problem-Based Instruction in Higher Education,” in: Teach the Student to Think Creatively, vol. 95, Perm, 1971, pp. 44–45. ↩

5. See: statistical yearbook The National Economy of the USSR in 1968, p. 555; in 1970, p. 518; “On the Introduction of Staff Positions and Official Salaries for the Professorial and Teaching Staff in Higher Educational Institutions,” Resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR of November 11, 1937, No. 2000. ↩