Alexander Shokhin Celebrates his 65th Birthday
On November 25, head of the department of the Theory and Practice of Business-Government Interaction, and President at HSE, Alexander Shokhin celebrated his 65th birthday.
In the early 1990s, the position of ‘President’ at Russian universities was so new it was not even mentioned in education law. But Mr Shokhin started to take an interest in HSE, helping it – before being appointed its President – while he was a minister in the Russian government. He allocated new buildings for HSE, enabling the university to significantly improve its teaching and research provision.
‘Perhaps it was that material contribution that saw me become President at HSE’, Alexander Shokhin says with his trademark sense of humor, adding ‘HSE was a kind of experiment that made it possible to take a new approach to teaching, selecting teachers and offering them additional training. Nobody back then could have imagined that it would top the ratings of Russia’s leading universities. We were not thinking about scale, but about quality, and we saw HSE as a kind of workshop.’
Himself a graduate of MSU, where one of his teachers was Evgeny Yasin, and a member of the USSR’s State Planning Committee – and subsequently of the Academy of Sciences’ National Economic Forecasting Institute, Alexander Shokhin was brought into the Russian government in the late 1980s as economic advisor to the USSR’s Foreign Minister. His name only became widely known in the country in 1991, when he was a key figure in Russia’s first reformist government and took responsibility for what was arguably the most thankless sector – the economy and finances.
Working always at the intersection of the academic, political, and business sectors, Mr Shokhin remains President of the HSE and of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. He represents the University’s interests in international, professional, and business organizations, and also at government level. And under him the HSE has developed a focus on GR studies.
Alexander Shokhin has long held that HSE is not ‘an economic institute that calls itself, grandly, a university,’ but ‘a classical university’, adding ‘the only thing we could do with more of – is physics.’ This year, as he celebrates his 65th birthday, the HSE has launched a physics faculty.
Happy Birthday, Mr Shokhin!