Is it time for Ukraine’s exiled academics to return?
Originally published by Times Higher Education on March 14, 2024
Consortium scholar Ararat Osipian was interviewed by Times Higher Education about the status of higher education in Ukraine in the face of war, destruction, and continued corruption. Read an excerpt featuring Osipian’s interview below:
Then there is the corruption. A 2015 USAID report found that Ukrainian universities were “rife” with it, and that perception is endorsed by Ararat Osipian, an economist who specialises in academic corruption. “There was outright bribery and fake degrees; you could purchase your master’s thesis or your PhD dissertation,” explains Osipian, who is a fellow of the New Europe College Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest but, under martial law, is unable to leave Ukraine and, having been displaced from the eastern city of Kramatorsk, now lives in a temporary shelter further west – “a refugee in my own country”.
But academic corruption is no surprise in a country that ranked 104th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index, which ranks countries on their transparency. “If everything around is corrupt, then higher education is also corrupt. It’s not an oasis,” Osipian says.
In 2021, the World Bank announced a $200 million investment to “support the Government of Ukraine’s efforts to strengthen efficiency, quality and transparency of the country’s higher education system”. The project will run until the end of 2026, but, Osipian points out, almost $100 million was redirected from the budget to cover academic and social scholarships for students after the outbreak of war. With half its funding gone, he is doubtful that the project will succeed.
Although there are success stories, however, Osipian fears that other displaced universities have relocated in name only. “They move to some other city where it’s relatively safe, and they register their legal address in that city, but there are no classrooms, no real administration, no students, no dorms, no research facilities,” he says.
Without sufficient crisis management, some institutions are simply “trying to make it look like they still function normally”, Osipian adds, enrolling and graduating students without the faculty or resources to hold classes. He is sceptical of universities that have switched entirely to online learning because “if it doesn’t take place in a [physical] classroom, it’s very hard to control the quality of teaching.”
Still, he believes that it is possible to make progress on the rebuilding of Ukrainian higher education even as the war grinds on. “There are safe cities in western Ukraine, like Lviv and Chernivtsi,” he says. “International aid can be brought to those safe cities. But it would have to come with conditions attached.” Aid should be paired with technical expertise, he believes, to enable Ukraine’s higher education system to be streamlined and restructured.
Read the original article here.
Ararat L. Osipian is a Founding Fellow of the New University in Exile Consortium at the New School University, New York, and a Fellow of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, Washington, DC.