A Roundtable with Professors from Ukraine
By: Ulrich Hewer
On Tuesday evening five professors from Kyiv – Mohyla Academy at George Washington University gave us an excellent – and sobering – overview of the endless and ongoing challenges Ukrainian universities are facing in their efforts to keep teaching, research and educational arrangements and institutions at the highest level for which they have been known for so many years. It says a lot about the character of a nation when teachers, researchers and students succeed in functioning as one cohesive organism in a fundamentally different environment and accept it as the ‘new normal’.
The audience particularly enjoyed the historical perspective the professors provided, using examples of their respective fields, such as law, history, engineering, and languages. I was most surprised to learn to what an impressive extent teaching and research, including cooperation with foreign partners, not only continues but even takes a new form of resilience and excellence in the presence of the murderous aggression by Russia – and thereby giving Ukrainian education and research a new quality. It was quite a learning experience for the audience to learn from the professors that similar experiences are hardly an exception in Ukraine but an existential phenomenon of their country’s long history of repeated attacks and attempted dominance and subjection efforts by other countries. The recent pandemic, with which so many countries struggled, was for Ukraine thus just one other unfortunate event to be mastered.
As became clear during the conversation with the professors from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, it is hard to imagine that any other country in the world undergoing similar conflicts or wars would achieve such a successful continuation of teaching and research as demonstrated by Ukraine. Will other countries study Ukraine’s experience and learn from it ?
The ‘Revolution of Dignity’ continues and sets an example for the rest of the world.
