Free University co-founder Kirill Martynov told The Insider that the university will continue to operate despite being declared “undesirable” in Russia because “people have the right to freely discuss, ask questions and learn what they want,” and this impossible to interfere.
“Prohibitive legislation, with the help of which the Russian authorities want to destroy everything living and independent of them in the country, and succeed to some extent, it hits ideas like the Free University very badly. The “Free University” is not a Latvian organization and not an organization at all. These are teachers and students who want to talk and conduct classes without intermediaries from the state. The geography can be very different – both face-to-face meetings, and home seminars, and what we usually do in Zoom and on other platforms. It is rather difficult to call this entire infrastructure of independent education built within the framework of the Free University “undesirable” activities over the course of three years.
We were reproached for defending ultra-liberal ideas. I don't know exactly what ultra-liberalism is, but the value behind the Free University is very simple: people have the right to freely debate, ask questions, and learn what they want. So the “Free University” will not disappear anywhere.
Our “undesirability” is such a critical red line in the sense that de facto everything uncensored in Russia is now prohibited, and what is called “higher education” is very quickly turning into a barracks where people are simply taught obedience and what the boss is always right,” said Martynov.
According to him, the main task of the university now is to ensure the safety of students and teachers who are in Russia:
“Now our priority is to protect the people who are in Russia, and most of them are our students. We will be adjusting how we work to make students' lives safer, so people can study in peace and worry less about this "undesirability". Obviously, our other colleagues here already have accumulated experience, and we were ready for this. The idea is clear – we need to become even more decentralized and anonymous, where necessary, and keep a safe part of the community outside the Russian Federation, where people can freely communicate and build educational projects.”
Martynov does not rule out that now agents who create reports for the authorities can try to infiltrate lectures: “It will be necessary to proceed from the idea that at any meeting where new students will be it was difficult to identify the rest of the participants in the meeting, especially students from Russia, so that there would be no direct association with the Free University. In fact, we are thinking in this direction, and new rules of work will be deployed in the coming days.”
According to Martynov, the status of "undesirability" in terms of negotiating positions in the world will only make life easier for the university. “We will be able to cooperate better with colleagues from universities in Europe and around the world. We have enough attention as it is. Everything is clear here – people were against the war, so they were awarded this “undesirability”, ”he said.