АКАДЕМИЧЕСКИЙ ОПЛОТ ИННОВАЦИОННОГО УНИВЕРСИТЕТА В УСЛОВИЯХ ПЕРЕХОДА К ЦИФРОВОЙ ЭПОХЕ: СОВОКУПНЫЕ РИСКИ

The article analysis the issues of the transformation of the academic staff of modern higher education and the changes that it has undergone over the past 25 years.

The article draws on the materials published in the annual publication “Research Bulleting of Kharkiv University of Humanities “People’s Ukrainian Academy” that allow tracking the changes in the university teacher and the risks they have been facing over a quarter of a century.

The author’s articles in the above edition give an insight into the global, regional, and local developments; the dramatic impact of economic and political conditions; the need to take into account the fundamentally different conditions of the academic staff genesis in domestic and Western European universities. The above is clearly evidenced in the article.

The author arrives at the conclusion that the aggregate risks dramatically reshaping the university teacher as the key actor of the educational process are objectively bound to increase with the transition to the digital era. The above challenge is far from being a speciality facing the domestic university alone; it’s a challenge shared by the educational systems worldwide, although manifested in a variety of ways.

The author places a particular focus on the fact that both educational systems – with the higher school above all – and certain regions as well as universities are going through a period of high-scale diversification characterized by a continually increasing rate. Given the above, the analysis of aggregate risks is to cover the peculiarities and the variety of approaches to meeting the challenges facing not only individual systems, countries, or regions, but certain universities as well.

It stands to reason that such approaches do not mean that the search for common markers is impractical. However, the desire to outline general tendencies and trends should not rule out the consideration of the features pinpointed in the article – a sharp increase in diversification processes promoting a global-scale analysis.

The author draws attention to the risks that have emerged only in the recent years and are associated with the advent of the so-called digital era that has further accelerated and complicated the already dynamic processes in the university world. First of all, it refers to the risk of academic staff being made significantly redundant and losing their university identity inherent to higher education until recently. The next issue is the ongoing sophistication and change of the “rules of the game” for universities, which creates a grave misunderstanding, rejection and resistance on the part of the university teacher.