Maia Chankseliani
Updated: 14 November 2025
In October 2025, the Georgian government released a national concept note outlining proposed reforms to the country’s higher education system. While the document acknowledges some long-standing structural issues, its recommendations raise serious concerns. It proposes to centralise control over curricula, staffing, and enrolment; to prescribe where academic programmes can be offered and by whom; to limit the autonomy of universities; to restrict international student access; and to reintroduce state steering of labour market alignment. Taken together, these proposals do not offer solutions to the real challenges facing Georgian higher education. Rather, they consolidate political authority and diminish the scope for academic freedom and institutional autonomy. They reflect a reassertion of state control over academic life at a time when institutional independence and global engagement should be actively protected.
Recent analyses suggest that this trajectory is not confined to Georgia. Across Central and Eastern Europe, academic freedom is increasingly constrained by the combined effects of authoritarian populism, neoliberal managerialism, and prestige-driven competition in global higher education. Marini & Oleksiyenko (2022)describe the post-Humboldtian university as a space where geopolitical imperatives, global status anxiety, and state-led agendas converge to undermine academic freedom and institutional autonomy. This consolidation of state control has broader implications for democratic institutions. As Ignatieff (2024) argues, academic freedom is not merely a professional privilege but a sustaining pillar of liberal democracy—a check on power and a guarantee of open inquiry. In his analysis of Hungary, Ignatieff shows how authoritarian populist regimes dismantle university autonomy not only to consolidate domestic control but also to signal ideological alignment with authoritarian powers abroad. In this geopolitical context, universities are not just educational institutions—they are sites of democratic contestation, caught between domestic authoritarian tendencies and the pressures of global ideological realignment.
The warning signs Ignatieff describes are already visible in the Georgian context. Empirical evidence from recent research shows that academic freedom in Georgia remains largely aspirational. Despite being protected in law, it is often curtailed in practice through political interference and managerial overreach. As Kobakhidze & Samniashvili (2022) demonstrate, Georgian universities continue to operate within structures shaped by Soviet legacies of hierarchy and control. Their interviews with academics reveal an environment where self-censorship, bureaucratic micromanagement, and the absence of secure employment undermine the principles of free inquiry. Academic freedom, they argue, exists de jure but not de facto, a condition sustained by fear of political reprisal and dependence on administrative goodwill. This echoes the broader regional pattern of ‘surrogate academic freedom’ described by Oleksiyenko (2020), where formal rights mask enduring constraints.
In the last two decades, the internationalisation of Georgian higher education and research has supported a departure from the Soviet model of higher education and research (Chankseliani et al., 2022; Chankseliani, Lovakov, et al., 2021; Lovakov et al., 2022). These studies show that post-Soviet countries, including Georgia, have made uneven but often substantial strides in strengthening university-based research and expanding international co-authorship. Georgia, in particular, implemented structural reforms that merged research institutes with universities—part of a broader shift toward institutional integration of higher education and research. Rather than building on these gains, the Georgian reform concept risks reversing momentum by deepening a legacy of centralised governance at the expense of openness and international integration.
As I have argued in What Happened to the Soviet University?(Chankseliani, 2022), the Soviet university was not merely a pedagogical institution but a powerful state apparatus for ideological control, bureaucratic reproduction, and social stratification. The underlying logic of the proposed reform mirrors the hierarchical, centralised command structures of the Soviet model. These logics are not only institutional but also epistemic: they shape how knowledge is defined, governed, and valued.
One of the clearest examples of this erosion is the proposal that the state should centrally determine all core and elective subjects for each academic programme. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how academic quality is achieved. A vibrant, autonomous academic community, rather than a government committee, is best placed to shape curricula. Likewise, the proposal to create standardised textbooks according to centrally designed plans, to be authored by state-salaried staff, revives a model of knowledge production that belongs to the Soviet past. Curriculum design must reflect the diversity of intellectual traditions, emerging knowledge fields, and local contexts. Imposing uniform content across institutions weakens innovation, narrows the epistemic horizons of students, and undermines the role of academics as independent knowledge producers. Academic freedom in curriculum development is a precondition for maintaining relevance, quality, and intellectual integrity in teaching and research.
Closely related is the suggestion that the state should take full responsibility for equalising the quality of all diplomas. In reality, this responsibility must rest with universities themselves through robust internal quality assurance and academic standards aligned with their distinctive missions. Quality cannot be legislated into existence. It emerges through trust in institutions, transparency in assessment, and the integrity of academic communities. Instead of equalising outcomes through administrative means, policy should support the conditions that enable diverse institutions to pursue excellence on their own terms.
The concept also proposes to link university enrolment quotas to labour market forecasts. This assumes a predictive power that no government has, especially in a capitalist economy, and reflects a return to the logic of planned economies, where the state acted as the sole employer and the private sector was absent. It also reflects a reversion to planned economy logic, in which the state determines the supply of graduates based on central forecasts. But labour markets are shaped as much by innovation, aspiration, and global trends as by domestic economic planning. Post-socialist education systems often experience tensions when economic planning legacies are combined with market-driven policy logics (Chankseliani, Qoraboyev, et al., 2021; Chankseliani & Silova, 2018). Attempts to reconfigure higher education systems around centrally defined economic goals have not consistently improved efficiency or quality. Labour market responsiveness is important, but it should not come at the expense of flexibility, disciplinary choices, or intellectual freedom. Planning student intake based on national forecasts risks bureaucratic distortion, misalignment with evolving opportunity structures, and limiting the ability of students and institutions to shape their own educational and professional trajectories.
In a similar vein, the proposed ‘one city – one department’ model would allocate academic programmes across cities by decree. This approach ignores the academic and disciplinary diversity necessary for a robust university system. No successful higher education system relies on rigid geographic separation of disciplines. This proposal would weaken institutions by restricting collaboration, limiting choice for students, and undermining regional development. The idea that central planning can engineer an optimal distribution of academic subject offerings risks fragmenting the academic environment by separating disciplines that often benefit from proximity and collaboration. Moreover, it risks entrenching territorial inequality by denying institutions the opportunity to diversify and evolve their academic profiles.
One of the most troubling proposals is the restriction on admitting international students to public universities. This reversal stands in stark contrast to the gains made through internationalisation over the past two decades. It signals a retreat from the global academic community at precisely the moment when transnational engagement is most critical. International students strengthen academic standards, broaden perspectives, and contribute to institutional sustainability. Research shows that internationalisation supports not only the quality of teaching and research but also contributes to broader societal development in both host and home countries (British Council & DAAD, 2014; Cannings et al., 2023; Chankseliani, 2025; Chankseliani, Kwak, Akkad, et al., 2025; Chankseliani, Kwak, Hanley, et al., 2025; Chankseliani & Kwak, 2024; Kwak & Chankseliani, 2024). Restricting international student access undermines both academic excellence and the long-term benefits of higher education engagement for the economy and society.
The document further proposes a rigid academic staffing structure, requiring universities to employ only full-time academic staff within fixed hierarchies. This approach disregards the flexible and diverse staffing models found across successful systems, including joint appointments, part-time roles, and practice-based teaching contracts. Staffing models should be shaped by institutional missions and academic needs, not by state-imposed formulas. These proposals reflect an understanding of higher education rooted in state control, not academic responsibility. By narrowing the range of possible appointments, the proposal risks weakening the teaching–research nexus and excluding professionals whose expertise falls outside traditional full-time pathways.
As a Georgian academic who has spent more than two decades working in higher education and research, who has studied Georgian, post-Soviet, European, and global systems, and who has served in high-level policy positions at the Ministry of Education and Science in Georgia, I have seen the consequences of top-down reforms that suppress academic freedom and institutional autonomy. The purpose of reform should be to create the conditions under which universities can thrive, not to prescribe their structure and function from the centre. Universities are not instruments of state planning; they are institutions that require autonomy to generate knowledge, educate critical thinkers, and contribute to democratic life. In the post-Soviet region, Oleksiyenko (2024) argues that transformative academic development is essential for resisting entrenched managerialism and fostering genuine critical inquiry. By this, he refers to cultivating communities of critical inquiry, tolerating disharmony, and strengthening intellectual leadership—practices that counter authoritarian and performative tendencies in universities.Drawing on both empirical evidence and long-term engagement with the Georgian system, I remain convinced that meaningful reform must be rooted in institutional trust, academic leadership, and international connectedness. Reform is needed. But reform that recentralises authority, narrows academic freedom, and isolates Georgian institutions from the global academic community is not the way forward.
References
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To cite this paper: Chankseliani, M. (2025). Centralising Power: Georgia’s Troubling University Reform. Universities & Intellectuals. https://chelps.eduhk.hk/page/detail/856