The subject of sociological analysis in the article is one of the important resources of modern higher education - the scientific and pedagogical community (SPS), considered by the authors as a key social community of universities (along with students and managers). The focus of attention is on two main incarnations of the SPS, that determine the place of the university in domestic and international rankings of higher education institutions. This is a professional-pedagogical and scientificeducational activity of the members of the community. It is emphasised that it is the SPS that today constitutes the “core” of the university’s intellectual asset. That leads to the growing attention to the SPS as an object of theoretical and empirical study in foreign and domestic science. Hence, the purpose of the article was defined as the identification of trends in the SPS research, shown through the prism of its contradictions and problems common to Russian and foreign universities. Special attention is drawn to two paradoxical situations typical of the domestic SPS. Firstly, as its number decreases, the structure of professional activity becomes more complicated, the number of tasks and the degree of responsibility increase, the amount of academic workload and unnecessary bureaucratic burden systematically increase. Secondly, the growing dependence of the university development strategy on scientific and pedagogical staff is combined in a contradictory way with a decrease in real managerial attention to them. Two theories served as a general theoretical framework for the authors - theory of social community and theory of resource dependence. The article presents the results of a systematic analysis of the literature, that allowed to reveal the contradictions in the reproduction of the scientific and pedagogical staff of universities, the impact of the development strategies of higher education and universities on the functioning and development of the SPS, as well as the contradictions in the development of the resource capacity of the SPS.
