After being invaded, hunted by Russians, forced to flee along the road of death and evading ongoing threats and bombardments, Ukrainian academics Yana Sychikova and Igor Lyman are rebuilding their workplace as a University Without Walls.
In a major feature, Future Campus looks at this extraordinary story, and the many challenges it raises for Australian education, including:
- Opportunities to grow research output at no or low cost through collaboration and strategic offshore relationships.
- Questions about the future viability of a single university occupying an underutilised swathe of real estate, loading infrastructure costs onto students, and perpetuating institution-centric models for education delivery.
- Potential to rapidly create new courses and curriculum in response to community need.
- Reimagining why – and how – tertiary institutions exist
Professors Sychikova and Lyman's Berdyansk State Pedagogical University was overrun by Russian troops in 2022, but has since re-established itself as a University Without Walls, re-shaping its curriculum, operations, research and education delivery around the needs of its community.
Pioneered in the US 70 years ago, the University Without Walls concept reorients education delivery around the needs and location of the student – and has been adopted as policy by the EU for implementation by 2030.
The concept has been refined and implemented institution-wide at BPSU with remarkable results; rebuilding enrolments, including troops on the frontline and students studying secretly in occupied territories; growing research output beyond pre-occupation levels despite the loss of all research infrastructure and repositories, and re-shaping research and curriculum around national need at high speed.
Professors Sychikova and Lyman have studied the experiences of 40 universities displaced by war, with insights of Ukraine's phoenix universities, featured in our article today, relevant for institutions around the globe – particularly those facing questions of governance, those looking to save money, and those willing to accept that new approaches to rebuilding social licence are required.
This is a compelling story, not just of 'the other war,' often overlooked while news and protests prioritise Gaza; but also of the future of universities. The success of the Universities Without Walls model, tested and refined in the crucible of a war 14,000 kilometres away, has ramifications that land right on Australia's campus doorsteps – raising questions about the future of HE that no sector leader can afford to ignore.