TOWARDS ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE: LANGUAGE ISSUES IN FABRIC OF NATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION

The paper explores the issues related to the language role and potential with regard to university academic excellence achievement. Two contrasting trends in higher education are mentioned (massification vs. elitism), the long standing international practice of building privileged groups of national universities is taken into account, the historic perspective of move from Latin to English dominance in education is briefly mapped to conduct relevant literature review and empirical research of national universities policies regarding language issues. The paper provides a detailed account of language policy components and their meaningful content dynamics taking the experience of the leading Russian universities that have become members of Russia wide academic excellence project that currently includes 21 higher education institutions. The paper concludes that language policy for Russian universities academic excellence is likely to go beyond students and faculty's language English skills training to create a multilingual campus with diverse activities in various languages.