Graduate school in Russia with ties to West loses accreditation
MOSCOW — One of Russia’s best-known graduate schools, created to avoid a brain drain among top academics in the newly open Russia of the 1990s, has lost its state accreditation amid fears of a wider clampdown on educational institutions with strong Western connections.
Russian government auditors last month revoked the accreditation of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, the second case in a year that a private school that partners with a European university has been downgraded.
“They are closing down independent intellectual centers,” said Mikhail Gelfand, a biotechnology professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.