In recent years, the value of enrolling in an Australian university has been defined by the job outcomes at the end – by many.
That’s why the Accord’s headline figure is about the percentage of workers with tertiary qualifications by 2050, and why the value of a degree is frequently evaluated in terms of employment outcomes.
But in the midst of war, when classes are forced to reconvene in a bomb shelter on a regular basis, the value of enrolling in a university can be quite different.
Ukrainian thought leader and Vice-Rector of Berdyansk State Pedagogical University Yana Sychikova explores what a university is and means after its campus – and regular expectations of life – are lost to war in a compelling new article.
“When we descend into the shelter, the classroom contracts into breath. The ceiling drops by a few invisible centimetres, and metal chairs, once intended for long lectures, suddenly become stools for short remarks. Phone flashlights create craters of light on the walls, and each laptop becomes a small candle. We do not say ‘a class in a shelter’; we say that the class itself is the shelter. In it, we preserve our possibility to be together and to call things by their names,” Professor Sychikova writes.
“Someone starts Zoom. Someone else boils water in a thermos powered by a power bank. Another holds a textbook on their knees; it smells of mould and damp from the fifth basement we have used this year. I ask, ‘Can you hear me?’ And from different cities, different rooms, and at different hours, short sounds of confirmation reach me — like birds pressing the air with their wings.”
This latest article from Professor Sychikova provides a host of sage observations on the character and value of the Ukrainian university which also prompts a reconsideration of what our own education system offers.
“In philosophy, a distinction is made between Körper, ‘the body we have’ (material, measurable), and Leib, ‘the body we are’ (experienced from within: rhythms, trust, habits). For the university, Körper means buildings, equipment, budgets; Leib means shared practices of teaching and research, care, language, and memory,” she writes.
The distinction is important. How many executive hours are invested in preservation or embellishment of Korper rather than Leib?
The loss of their campus and forced reinvention first on park benches nearby and then in a new, disaggregated but connected physical incarnation in Ukrainian-held territory forced Professor Sychikova and colleagues to re-evaluate what held the university together. They also too a new look at the resourcing and culture required to enable knowledge production and education to continue, stronger than ever sans Korper.
“Someone listens in a dormitory kitchen in Poland, someone else in a car parked by a German supermarket. The Leib of a university without walls is the ability to laugh in different rooms with a single voice. And we allow ourselves this right: to laugh even during war. Laughter through trauma is not frivolity, but proof of life, a refusal to let pain monopolise our voices,” she writes.
It’s a powerful piece.
The compelling relevance to other HE systems such as our own is immediately apparent to anyone not blinded by the comfort of their own campus. It is our path to student experience, to social licence, to resource allocation, fiscal planning and should be the soundtrack underneath our strategic planning days.
In a system only starting to comprehend days that are not relatively easy, the lessons from those who have already traversed the gamut of institutional upheaval are too frequently submerged in the hubris of faded balance sheet glories. The piece builds on the work that Professor Sychikova presented to the Future Campus Universities Without Walls conference.
As Professor Sychikova observes: “When I think of ‘university’, I am ashamed to remember first the codes of specialisations, the square metres of classrooms, and the sizes of budgets. That is how I was taught, and how I once taught others. As Vice-Rector, I still file reports that include the following information: the number of square metres, the number of buildings, the distribution of space. Formally, all the premises we left behind under occupation remain on the university’s balance sheet. On paper, they are our Körper. But there is one nuance: this is a body without breath, and it no longer belongs to us. We exist beyond it.”