Universities under fire in Ukraine’s war

Academics are being called before special committees accused of being separatists or terrorists. If found guilty they can lose their jobs, Tatyana Malyarenko reports

Pro-Russian rebel aims his rifle in the streets of Donetsk

Photo credit: Marko Djurica/Reuters

UKRAINE’S 317 UNIVERSITIES are divided by politics. The Euromaidan revolution and the war in the eastern part of the country has split Ukraine’s academic community in two. The Ukrainian government decided in late 2014 that all universities located in the occupied territories would be evacuated to territory controlled by Ukraine, and re-established with new buildings and equipment. But some academics decided not to go, so now all universities in Donetsk and Lugansk have doubles on the other side of the line. For example, my own university – Donetsk State Management University – was evacuated to Mariupol, but a university with the same name and on our former premises remains in Donetsk, in the self-declared Donetsk Peoples’ Republic.

A wall of hatred and hostility has been built between formerly friendly colleagues. Before the war, discussions on the reform of higher education were purely professional; now such discussions are always coloured by politics. And of course, the reverse applies in pro-Russian groups. Professional discussions are very rare now.

It all began with a decree issued by Sergyi Kvyt, Ukraine’s minister of education on 29 July 2014, which established special commissions at universities in Ukraine, and aims to discover potential “separatist attitudes” in faculties.

In the pro-Ukrainian faculty, if you criticise the Ukrainian higher education system, you are immediately labeled a separatist, or a Kremlin agent

If the commission finds that a professor may be a separatist, he or she can be fired from university, under Article 41 of the Labour Code of Ukraine, which bans “amoral behavior”. There have been many famous cases of whistleblowing already: the faculty and students inform attestation commissions or the ministry of education of Ukraine directly about “separatist attitudes” or provocative speech by their colleagues. In its turn, the ministry of education of the DNR passed a special decree banning any contacts between the faculty of universities under the control of the DNR and their Ukrainian colleagues. These contacts, the decree said, would be treated as a high treason and punishable by death.

The most famous of these divisions is the conflict between the staff of Donetsk National University, who were evacuated to Vinnitsa (in west Ukraine) and those who remained in Donetsk. The Ukrainian faculty accused their colleagues from Donetsk of supporting a terrorist organisation (the Donetsk People’s Republic has been defined as a terrorist organisation in Ukrainian legislation) and claimed that this nullified their colleagues’ degrees. In response, the ministry of education of the DNR appropriated the houses and property of those faculty who had left.

The second biggest indicator of the changes in Ukraine has been arguments over the teaching of Ukraine’s history. The ministry of education of Ukraine introduced national and patriotic education for young people and children. The curriculum contains the main facts of Ukraine’s history and dictates the ways in which they should be interpreted at schools and universities. In its turn, universities on the territory of the self-declared republics abolished the history of Ukraine as a separate teaching course and proposed their own vision of Ukraine’s history, based on Russian textbooks.

The third aspect that highlights the atmosphere during this period is the rise in self-censorship at universities. This is motivated by the goal of maintaining the unity of the Ukrainian nation during the war. Self-censorship limits criticism of the government and its policy, including limits on the discussion of education policy.

As a result, the universities in Ukraine are moving away from a culture of liberty and tolerance, and returning to their Soviet past, where education was a tool to produce politically loyal and compliant citizens.

However, I remain optimistic. Though universities are a place of discord now, they have the potential to become a platform for reconciliation. It is the academic community’s duty to generate ideas of national unity and find the way to stop this war. Open discussion of urgent and sensitive issues, through contacts with students and local communities, is the most efficient way to do that.

Belarus: state loyalty over academic freedom

uladzimir matskevich looks at why Belarusian scholars face pressure to fall in with the government line

After the USSR launched the first satellite and put the first man in space the myth of the brilliance of Soviet education was born. In post-Soviet Belarus the myth endures, sustained by persistent government propaganda. Yet recent developments suggest that the reality for the country’s students and academics is less than rosy.

During the Soviet time the mere expression “academic freedom” was not in use at all. After graduation students were sent to work in an organisation that was chosen for them. In order to ensure that this system worked, everything was centralised and no university could disregard the decisions of the ministry of education. Academic institutes were deprived of all autonomy and independence. This is the heritage universities in post-Soviet countries deal with today.

Even the limited independence that universities had in the early 90s soon came to be seen as a threat by the authorities. In Belarus, after President Lukashenko came to power in 1994, all traces of academic freedom were eliminated. Elections of rectors of state universities were abolished in 2000, and in 2003 in private ones. The roots of students’ self-governance were destroyed as well. Thus the education system in Belarus has returned to the Soviet-style.

In 2012 around 30 well-known and respected academics, from Hrodna State University in Belarus, were sacked after an order by a local official. Their involvement in the publication of a history book that dared to challenge the party line made them dangerous in the eyes of the authorities. One independent researcher estimated that there have been hundreds of other dismissals.

Consider the Higher Attestation Commission (VAK), which has a special importance in academia in post-Soviet countries. It is a state-run body that oversees the awarding of academic degrees – in other words, the prerogative to confer degrees belongs not to the academic community, but to the state. Dissertations are marked not on the basis of their scientific value, but according to loyalty to and personal relations with members of an academic council.

Belarus has attempted to join the Bologna Process, which aims to set standards for common European educational values, but its application was rejected in 2012. The drive to join the process has led to some superficial changes, but in terms of academic freedom, nothing has changed.

Universities’ management and professors continue to face considerable discrimination and professional insecurity. Those with political views that contradict state propaganda often lose their short-term contracts. The main aim of higher education in Belarus continues to be not to train qualified professionals, but to ensure that young people and intellectuals are loyal to the current regime.

©Uladzimir Matskevich

Translated by Andrei Aliaksandrau

Uladzimir Matskevich is the founder of the Belarus Humanitarian Technology Agency

© Tatyana Malyarenko