Relevance. The question of the optimal combination of meritocracy and democratization in the field of higher education and science is indeed very complex and requires in-depth analysis. I propose to look at this problem using the example of Russia from a temporal perspective: from the moment of higher education reforms after the collapse of the USSR, and to the isolation of Russia after the Invasion of Ukraine and exclusion from the Bologna process. Special attention will be paid to the issue of restoration and reform of higher education in Russia after the change in the political regime and the reintegration of Russia into the international education space.

Problem. Higher education is not only a very inertial system, the reform of which takes years. Higher education is an extremely sensitive topic for every state and every nation because it is closely related to the future development of society. Therefore, speaking about Russia, the problem is not only in the implementation of reforms, but also in social, political, and psychological perception and agreement with the reforms, as well as the “historical baggage” of Russian science.

Method and methodology. The theoretical framework of the study is represented by the concepts of the French structuralists Foucault, Derrida, and Bourdieu about the academic community and the functioning of science in society. The methodological framework is historical analysis, discourse analysis, and quantitative sociological methodology.

As part of the presentation, I will present data on various aspects of Russian higher education and explain the key problems in the development of higher education. I will present data from my research on the age structure and recruitment strategies at Russian universities. I will consider the essence and causes of the problems of international integration of Russian science until 2014.

Future reforms: meritocracy or democratization? Of course, in the future, there will be a lot of work to democratize Russian higher education and science. But how to do this, since years of isolation and political pressure will have a very strong impact on the state of not only higher education as an institution but also on the academic community? I will consider some options for combining strategies of meritocracy and democratization of higher education in Russia.

The widespread consensus towards meritocracy is historically linked to the belief that the educational system, as the primary driver of social mobility, is capable of transcending ascribed conditions and rewarding achievement through a meritocratic selection (Parsons, 1970; Bell, 1972). However, the thesis that society is progressively transforming into an education-based meritocracy has been widely challenged by numerous studies emphasising the influence of socio-economic background on educational results and trajectories (Goldthorpe 2008; Martins & Veiga, 2010; Barone & Ruggera, 2015; Bernardi & Ballarino, 2016; Giancola & Salmieri, 2022).

In this regard, the latest data from Istat show that in Italy, 67.6% of individuals with at least one parent holding a tertiary degree attain a university degree, while in families with at least one parent holding a high school degree, this percentage decreases to 39.1%, dropping further to 12.3% when parents have at most a lower secondary education level (Istat, 2023).

Despite this evidence, in the contemporary collective imaginary, the idea that schools provide equal opportunities to students, regardless of their socio-economic conditions, is increasingly widespread and those who achieve academic success are considered deserving of occupying the highest social positions (Barone, 2012; Darnon et al., 2018; Kuppens et al., 2018; Boarelli, 2019;). In this perspective, meritocracy has been considered a powerful ideology that legitimises and reproduces social inequalities, transforming social privilege into merit (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964; Barone, 2012; Brigati, 2015; Cingari, 2015; Littler, 2017; McNamee, 2018; Sandel, 2020).

To better understand the mechanisms underlying adherence to meritocracy, over the last decade, a large body of research has investigated the so-called subjective aspects of meritocracy, distinguishing between descriptive and prescriptive value of meritocratic beliefs, corresponding to individual perceptions and preferences regarding the social order (Castillo et al., 2019). Most of these studies have relied on data collected during the five editions of the survey on social inequalities of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) (ISSP Research group, 2022) and have explored the relationship between meritocratic beliefs and individuals' positions in the social structure (Duru-Bellat & Tenret, 2012; Tenret, 2014; Reynolds & Xian, 2014; García-Sánchez et al., 2019; Mijs, 2021; Batruch et al., 2023;).

With the aim of analysing the Italian context, still relatively unexplored in the national and international scientific literature, the present contribution investigates the meritocratic perceptions and preferences of the population and the importance attributed to education as a merit element, examining their trends over the past decades. The analysis has been carried out on data collected in Italy within the surveys on social inequalities of ISSP in 2009 and 2019 will be presented (ISSP Research group, 2022). Results highlight the coexistence of both meritocratic and non-meritocratic elements in individual perceptions regarding what people need to get ahead in Italy, the increase in preferences for an education-based meritocracy, the strong association between perceived and desired meritocracy, and variations in meritocratic beliefs based on gender, age, perceived social class, and educational level.

The education system is called to respond to the challenge of complexity (Morin 2001, Casavecchia 2020).
The spread of a meritocratic ideology confines the educational proposal of the education system within a competitive system in which it is the 'final evaluation' that becomes central (Corsini 2023), while the educational and learning process is neglected.
Already Michael Young (2014) warned with his dystopian design of meritocracy.
Behind the principle of merit, there is the risk of preserving inequalities and fuelling social exclusion (Giancola, Salmieri 2023), which have origins in a family and social context. The school becomes a space of reproduction of inequalities (Bernstein 2020, Ribolzi 2020) many often, and the choices of families end up confirming the distances.
This process ends up weakening and fragmenting a society that blocks social mobility.
Karl Mannheim highlighted how education and social systems are interconnected and mutually supportive. The sociologist highlights the differences between totalitarian system/democratic system/liberal system because they propose alternative images of man.
the first is aimed at forming a bureaucratic character in the individual. The second is inspired by the character of the rugged individualist. The suggested alternative is the one that fits into the democratic personality (Mannheim 1968, Casavecchia 2022)
Finally, we describe the dimensions that can lead to keeping merit and inclusion in balance within a democratic society. John Dewey can help us through two-dimensional development:
1. Valuing the educational process and the educational network (Mannheim, Campbell Stewart 2017, Besozzi 2017, Merico and Scardigno 2023)
2. Valuing merit to promote the personal “profession” (Dewey 2020 e Casavecchia 2020).

The main purpose of this contribution is to claim that all the attempts to find balance between meritocracy and democracy can only succeed if these two objectives are understood not as alternative concepts but as complementary and co-functional terms.

According to the proposed perspective, enhancing merit also means widening the opportunities of social inclusion for disadvantaged people, as much as promoting democracy also means allowing each individual to find its own role in society, according to one's specific personal merits.

Democracy itself needs to be reinterpreted according to its literal meaning: people’s (demos) power (cratos), which is, mostly, the power to choose. Thus, in order to be actually democratic, tertiary educational paths need to be equally open to diverse people’s choice, but there must be awareness that choosing a certain educational path does not necessarily imply a successful or consistent professional path for all.

Merit, on the other hand, is still assumable as the effort which needs to be added to one’s intelligence (as stated in Young formula) in order to reach an objective. Effort depends both on personal skills and motivation developed through previous formal and informal socialization, and on how tertiary education can work to reduce starting inequalities, while promoting the understanding of competition as an engine for individuals to evolve to their better selves and not as the mere social push to emerge or reach for a predetermined role model or status symbol.

Historically speaking, widening access to tertiary education was a top priority in western societies during the whole last century. But over the last decades it proved it difficult for tertiary education to resist the “cons” of such a democratic turn: marketization of education led both to a consumerist attitude of institutions and a to the wide perception that university degrees – more than academic education itself – are fundamental in order to achieve more remunerative jobs. This led most of people to compete for positions that are not available for all, and caused (i) a wasteful competition and a loss of resources and efforts that could have been better invested in other activities, (ii) and an oversupply of graduates, that also involves credential inflation, pushing competition further and further, while losing focus over the promotion of actual competences, so that the over-qualification does not correspond to an actual over-skilling but, instead, to a skills-mismatch. These interrelated processes produce inequalities since many end up professionally and socially unsatisfied and excluded: both the meritocratic and the democratic issue are so disregarded.

An initial solution to this paradox could be found in the above stated re-interpretation of democracy and merit as not opposite terms but as both objectives of contemporary societies cooperating in order to realize a diverse social inclusion. This could lead to rethink widening access policies in tertiary education according to a meritocratic principle, aimed at promoting the reduction of starting inequalities through in itinere guidance, and re-orientation of individuals well in time so as not to cause wasteful competition and professional and social exclusion.

The aim of the proposal is to address the issue of meritocracy in the age of the crisis of democracy. Specifically we focus the degeneration of this concept that, in this scenario, leans to become very abused and misunderstood in a way that outlines the pattern of a very clear paradox and rhetoric of meritocracy. We attempt to understand this problem firstly trough a survey of the recent italian debate about the degeneration of meritocracy and the paradoxes of the progressist and hyperdemocratic school; secondly linking this debate to the contemporary revival and discussion of Bordieu’ theory of the reproduction and symbolic violence (Harker 1990; Reed-Danahay, 2005; Stahl, Garth and Mu, Guanglun Michael, 2022); eventually we insert this suggestion in the very productive Mannheim’s framework of the crisis of democracy and the notion of regression recently re-examined and updated by Casavecchia (2022).

In the past italian debate prevailed the idea of Tullio De Mauro (2018) about the possibility of a popular and democratic linguistic education in the direction to cancel the differences among the population. The topic of this theory is that the mass accessibility of the language, knowledge and competences raise up the mass towards more exclusive level of education. Mass system of education is in function of the raising of the mass, not of the levelling down.

The line of the democratic education is toward the top not involving a lowering of the standards. On the contrary, in the contemporary society, it entails that levelling down. Mastrocola and Ricolfi (2021) higlighted the overturn of this perspective in the degeneration of progressive ideals of education and the evidence that the education agency failed the goal of awarding the merit. They outline the situation of the “scholastic damage” namely a school and a university which, in a contradictory democratic urge ends up decreasing quality and increasing gap between upper class and lower class. The outcome of this system is the leveling of the excellencies and the conservation of a sort of Bordieu’s circle of reproduction with new variables and patterns.

Bordieu’s theory suggests that the progressive ideal generates the paradox that we have not a pervasive diffusion of the knowledge and the awarding of and invest in the merit by the educational agencies and the socio-political institutions, but instead at the same time the paradox of the rethorical exhisibiton of the ideal of meritocracy in presence of an a-democratic lowering of standards and the continuity of the logic of the reproduction that favorites the dominant position agencies and his exploitation of the symbolic violence.

This scenario is at the same time cause and effect of the crisis of the democracy and shows a perfect shorting out understandable within Mannheim’s framework of the crisis of democracy and regression. Therefore the attempt will be to provide an interplay between Mannheim’s and Bordieus’account.