Opinion
Yesterday I bought what had been rated as Australia’s fourth-best Christmas ham (according to someone who managed to capture my attention for far too long by describing the process of blind-tasting 18 hams with a panel of carnivores). My problem was how to wedge it into the newly-cleaned fridge in a manner acceptable to my nearest and dearest.
Later in the day, I chatted to the extraordinary Igor Lyman and Yana Sychikova, who are facing a different set of yuletide challenges. In between interminable periods in bomb shelters ducking away from Russian aerial raids, Igor spends his time on the 20th floor of a 25-storey apartment block in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, with electricity for a few hours each day. When there is no power there is no water, no heat, no cooking and no elevator – meaning a whole lot of stairs in the dark if he wants the protection of a bomb shelter below.
Yana, who used to work just along the hall from Igor, has a similar situation in a different city – both displaced from their hometown by the Russian invasion more than three years ago.
Suffice to say, I did not share my challenges with relocating my ham.
But here is the most remarkable thing. They are not asking for your pity. In fact, they only casually talk about the grinding reality of their everyday when asked – knowing that it is shared by millions of others around them. The remarkable thing is they are more committed to their work and scholarship as Professors of Berdyansk State Pedagogical University than ever before and are enthusiastic about sharing insights from their enforced pilot program – running a university literally without walls.
The extraordinary success of their phoenix university – rebuilding enrolments almost to pre-war levels and actually increasing research output despite the loss of labs, library and campus is a story with relevance to every Australian tertiary institution.
Sure, the extreme operating environment, desperate motivations and potential unification of purpose under enemy fire is far from the Australian campus experience. But Europe adopted the University without Walls model with plans to introduce it by 2030, for a number of reasons which help explain the relevance of the Ukrainian experience to Australia.
The outcomes achieved by the Berdyansk State Pedagogical University top the list. If Professor Sychikova and Lyman and their colleagues can run growing, high quality courses and also expand their research output with no campus, no access to their hometown and tiny budgets, in the midst of a war; then what does that say about the fragility of our own models, which are operating at maybe 10 times the cost, built on the back of a massive, cumbersome asset bank of real estate and isolationist infrastructure builds?
Massification of higher education through campus-centric organisational structures and delivery has certainly increased participation in Australia, but as the Accord has identified, major issues with equality of access remain; thwarting opportunities to grow education rates to the levels required in the workforce of the future. Statistics show that the famous Australian delusion of being the land of the fair go stops at the campus gates.
How will the Government afford to put another 1 million students through tertiary education by 2050 – even if most of those go to relatively lower cost courses at TAFE? There is no clear answer in relation to revenue, but Ukraine offers some relevant insights in relation to costs.
Professor Sychikova, hunted by the Russians for her last month living under occupation, realised that a new operating model was required to establish effectively a university in exile, when she reached relative safety of Ukrainian-held territory.
The university library, newly stocked with several thousand books donated by the Ukrainian diaspora, was destroyed by Russian forces intent on Russifying occupied communities. Escaping only with the university seal and charter, the staff created a campus-less institution, with systems and processes built around students, who had scattered to whatever havens they could find around the world.
The new model would not just be online, but would also take classes and social gatherings to different cities across Ukraine in a nomadic enterprise that they built as they ran it.
Professor Lyman, an expert on the history of Southeastern Ukraine, had lost a huge volume of research materials, as well as access to the area, and joined Professor Sychikova in documenting and analysing the experiences of staff and students in 40 displaced universities across Ukraine.
There is no pretending that the new Universities Without Walls model has been easy – a new paper in pre-print in Nature by Professor Sychikova and colleagues chronicles the burnout suffered by an overwhelming proportion of staff seeking to sustain teaching and research while living in air raid shelters or cold, dark flats – waiting for the power to come on long enough that they can charge their laptops and keep working.
The study of 1,493 Ukrainian academic staff was collected in three surveys in 2022, 2023 and 2024, finding that burnout symptoms had risen from 49.5% to 71.8% in the most recent survey.
But despite the toll of living and working amidst war, Professor Sychikova is adamant there are elements of the new operating model that have potential to change higher education for the better, regardless of where they are implemented.
Which helps put my ham conundrum into perspective. After a year of great turbulence in Australian higher education, the benefits of wider conversations and fresh perspectives are ever clearer.
Professor Sychikova and Lyman will join a host of Australian university leaders to discuss the opportunities to expand education access and build research outputs through strategic collaboration at the Universities Without Walls Symposium in Canberra on 23 February 2026.