RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE ESSENCE OF UNIVERSITY
The article is exploratory in nature. The aim of the research is to reveal the essential reasons for the low competitiveness of Russian universities in the global market of education and science. We used dialectical and analytical methods of the reality cognition to reveal the contradictions between the essence of University and its manifestation in the institutions of higher education of the XXI century. We studied the understanding of classical and contemporary authors about the essence of University education and its historical changes since the appearance of the first universities to the present time. We studied the mission statement of the Russian and foreign universities, the leaders in the educational market. The transformation is described of the essence of University in the process of historical development and its current manifestations that define the position of universities in the world ranking. We developed a formulation of the essence of modern University and demonstrated its threefold structure. We selected the levels of manifestation of the essence of University: existing, similar, distant and visible. The developed formulations of the essence of the system elements with respect to the hierarchy levels of University are given, reflecting a high degree of separation from them of the current manifestations of these elements in the Russian education in the beginning of XXI century, which determines the low competitiveness of Russian universities in the global market. Further research should be directed at the development of systemic upgrade of the structural constituent entities of the University, as having the greatest impact on the pace and results of the competitiveness of Russian universities. The obtained results allow adjusting and deepening the strategies of competitiveness improvement used by the management of Russian universities. Among the valuable results of the paper are the revealed essence of modern University and the representation of its structure as a unity of spirit, intellect and energy of the staff, which allowed developing a new definition of the «University» concept. The distinguishing of the levels of manifestation of essence allows us to estimate the degree of disengagement from it of the current Russian universities, to understand the root causes of intrinsic inconsistency of the system elements of a concrete University and come closer to their meaningful improvement for effective improvement of its competitiveness.