The study of student experience in research universities is now a rapidly growing field of research. There is a v considerable amount of scientific literature examining various aspects of this problem. During the last twenty years were launched a number of large-scale national surveys of student involvement, including National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), National Student Survey (NSS), Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE), Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC). Since Russian universities a lagged way behind top ranked HEI's there is a growing societal demand for improvement of this situation. Is it possible that the decline of Russian universities is caused by low student involment both into curricular and extracurricular activities? That is the key question of our paper. We focused our attention on one of the oldest Russian universities - Kazan Federal University (founded in 1804) Since Kazan university declared its adherence to the values of research university we proceeded from the assumption that the problems inherent to the research universities elsewhere in the world might be also relevant to the case of Kazan university. During the field work we obtained some evidence concerning declining student involvement in Kazan.

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