Amidst the destruction of Mariupol, a port city in southern Ukraine, in 2022, students and staff of the Mariupol University walked through snow and ice for around 90 kilometres to the neighbouring city of Berdyansk.
Staff from Berdyansk’s university found food and shelter for the exhausted refugees in student dorms – only for Ukrainian forces to sink a Russian warship Saratov that night, in docks immediately adjacent to the university.
The next day, every door in the dorm was knocked down and each were individually interrogated before being sent away, and the dorm closed.
And we talk about our student accommodation problems …
Friday marked exactly four years since Russian forces rolled into Berdyansk, and in a strange juxtaposition, also the final day of a week-long visit of Professors Yana Sychikova and Igor Lyman of Berdyansk State Pedagogical University.
In a tightly packed week, they relayed their story directly to more than 500 educators in various events, forums and meetings, and reached thousands more Australians through media interviews.
In the seven extraordinary days Professors Sychikova and Lyman spent away from the warzone in Australia, a few key insights emerged:
- The extraordinary strength of responding to aggression with care. In Kyiv, there are up to 12 air raids over a 24 hour period, many lasting for hours at night. In an environment where you and your students face danger walking the dog, going to the shops or just sleeping in your bed, they have discovered and measured the power of systematically and scientifically providing heightened levels of care to each other and themselves. Not pretending it is a complete solution, but rather a required intervention.
- Distress is not a competition. Humans have similar issues of different magnitude. Australian institutions are going through uncertainty, staff burnout, funding issues, staffing issues, challenges of dealing with AI, challenges of better engaging students. Ukrainian institutions are going through all those issues as well, and while the magnitude of the challenges they face are stratospherically higher, the insights and solutions they are working with have remarkable relevance.
- Failure in HE operations must be an option. Professor Sychikova and Lyman in four years have become internationally-recognised experts on the impact of severe crises on HE – relevant not just to war, but to natural disasters, climate crises etc. Their commitment to documenting the experience of Ukrainian institutions in real time is capturing extraordinary insights. Their willingness to implement a range of interventions and quickly analyse and report on those that are not working – for example in addressing mental health and wellbeing of staff – and then acting to focus on what does work contrasts with the all-too-often approaches we see in Australia of opaque, slow and often unrigorous and/or unbalanced analysis of issues and a rush to blame shifting for less successful programs.
- Deferring action on important things is an Australian institutional luxury, but a luxury of the double bacon breakfast burrito kind, it’s not good for your long term health. It’s now eight years since we measured national research performance. The JRG has been in place since 2021. We are awash with regulation to try to force centralised oversight of change to identified, long-term sector failings. In contrast, with no campus, few funds, and a constant threat to the lives of themselves and their students, our Ukrainian colleagues have re-evaluated why their university exists, how it should work, and what it could do better, all within a relatively tiny window of time. It’s important not to romanticise this approach, or suggest it is complete and resolved, but for the students starting in Australian universities this week, the suggestion that we be allowed another few years to find a clear articulation of purpose and more efficient organising and assessment principles is not satisfactory. While they slog through hastily reinvented assessments and stump up tens of thousands of dollars for a degree which is being progressively devalued by multiple actors in the community, they collectively deserve, and hopefully, still have the optimism to expect, faster, braver reforms.
- Vulnerability can help drive agility. Professor Sychikova and Lyman’s lives are defined not by dispossession, but rather what they have achieved, learned and shared through necessity and reinvention since their homes and campus were occupied. The fear of losing the status, incomes, fancy campuses and busy work of meeting and jockeying with each other can be crippling, preventing action. We don’t necessarily need to ditch campuses, but we do need to be able to see beyond them and step away from the trappings of position, stratification and status entrenched in every echelon of our institutions long enough to occasionally regain touch with solutions that would better serve and satisfy community. Lack of bandwidth to recognise the emerging challenges of lower cost knowledge delivery platforms, better solutions to social licence, and kinder, more effective ways of forging internal institutional cohesion and effectiveness is a problem.
- Focus is key. Student progression and knowledge creation are the central organising tenets for the reborn and/or reconsidered Berdyansk State Pedagogical University. Professors organise timetables, delivery and shape lessons around student circumstance and need. Staff and students, stripped not just of hierarchical office structures, but homes and safety, find stronger bonds which help drive better progression outcomes. Can we afford to strive to achieve the same in our massified system? Can we afford not to try if we are really going to welcome a million extra learners within 24 years, as the Accord suggests?
- Partnership has power. Last Thursday, Yana and Igor presented some fascinating insights into incidence and successes and failures of managing staff burnout, in an event held in partnership with the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Education. Dean Marek Tesar led with insights of his own directly relevant to the Ukrainian experience, followed by reflections and insights from three UoM researchers doing relevant work – packing the initiation of two-way inter-country dialogue into less than two hours of a fascinating event. There is huge value not just in being heard, but in building relationships and meaning for future discussions.
For those who missed them, Professor Sychikova and Lyman’s two remarkable presentations are accessible via the buttons below.
For those who want to help, Future Campus is raising money to buy generators for students of Yana and Igor’s institution, Berdyansk State Pedagogical University. You can donate via the link below.