For the imperial period, one of the go-to texts is Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia by Samuel Kassow. Like a good many works on Russian education, Kassow examines higher education through the lens of the growing disenchantment with the tsarist state and the radicalization of the student body. Faculty are often quite different in their politics than their students, and Russian Academicians And The Revolution: Combining Professionalism And Politics by Vera Tolz examines how the somewhat politically-conservative Academy of Sciences responded to the advent of the Bolsheviks. Igal Halfin's From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia covers similar ground. The article "The Russian University system and the First World War" by Alexander Dmitrie covers the Russian university at war and some of the linkages between the university system's war experience and the Revolution. For the wider social context of the Obshchestvennost' (educated society), the anthology Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia is one of the essential texts, including Alfred Rieber's contribution, "The Sedimentary Society."

The historiography on the Soviet university system is much more heterogeneous and less focused than that of the late imperial period. A lot of the pioneering work on Soviet higher education focuses upon the early period of the USSR, such as Sheila Fitzpatrick's Education and social mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–1934 and her various works on Lunacharsky. Michael David-Fox's Revolution of the mind: Higher learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 is a study of the Bolshevik's higher education policies. David-Fox's essay "The Assault on the Universities and the Dynamics of Stalin's 'GreatBreak,' 1928–1932" in the anthology Academia in Upheaval: Origins, Transfers, and Transformations of the Communist Academic Regime in Russia and East Central Europe contextualizes the early Stalinist period * . Benjamin Tromly's Making the Soviet Intelligentsia Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev is a recent monograph that is exactly what it says on the tin. Joseph I. Zajda's Education in the USSR dates from 1980, but it is a good window into how the late-Soviet university system functioned. Another Cold War-period piece, the anthology Soviet Education under Scrutiny is the result of a 1985 academic conference that took place under the shadow of Glasnost. Finally, the article "Soviet higher education: an alternative construct to the western university paradigm" by Alex Kuraev takes a long-term view of the Soviet educational model and outlines its differences from that of the West.

*On a side note, googling "Stalinist University"-even in googlescholar- returns a number of American conservative tripe about contemporary higher education. Even though it is morning here, I feel I need a drink.

Belated thanks for this thoughtful reply! Looks like I have some serious reading to do...