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It is rather easy to identify the leading universities in a country, there are different established methods and indicators of excellence. Generally, it is more challenging to find 'the second best' universities which have the potential to become leaders, 'the firsts'. In Russia, such an attempt has been made. The program of 'Pillar Universities' was realized in 2016–2020, in two stages. This paper analyzes the initial stage of the project and its outcomes. We aim to investigate how the program affected the output of the universities from the bibliometric point of view. The results, obtained by bibliometric methods, are encouraging. There is an increase in publication output above the Russia's average growth. Multidisciplinarity, domestic and international collaboration also increase. Those universities which had no papers in the top journals started publishing their research there. The overall effect of the 'pillar project' is found to be positive. Bibliometrics is widely used for assessing higher education institutions and is free from local peculiarities. This allows using the observations of this study in a broader context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a theoretical analysis of scientific approaches to determining the components of teaching effectiveness from the students’ point of view. Three groups of indicators of the teacher’s effectiveness are distinguished: pedagogical mastery, professional and personal qualities; their components are revealed. Students’ feedback on the teaching of subjects at Berdyansk State Pedagogical University in two periods - pre-war (during the coronavirus pandemic) (735 reviews) and the military invasion of Russia in Ukraine (627 reviews) were analyzed. It was revealed that the war affected the change of priorities in the assessment of the effectiveness of the professional activity of teachers of higher education institutions, namely: during the martial law, the highest indicators were given to personal qualities, in contrast to the professional qualities of teachers, which were prioritized in the pre-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]