When Serhiy Kvit went from being president of the prestigious National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy to become Ukraine’s minister of education, many had great hopes.
Two years later, Kvit was dismissed from his post as parliament voted in the new cabinet of Prime Minister Volodymr Groysman. Although Kvit achieved a 69 percent fulfillment score for his policy agenda in 2015, according to the National Council of Reforms, his performance has received mixed reviews.
University rectors seem pleased with the greater autonomy given to them by the law on higher education introduced in 2014. But academic researchers, most of whom work under Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences rather than universities, say they are poorer than ever and feel that their work is under threat.
Kvit’s vision was to bring the corrupt and splintered higher education system closer to a Western model, where research units are generally part of universities and there is a more democratic balance between academic staff, students and management.
More autonomy
The law on higher education was drafted by a group of university rectors even before the EuroMaidan Revolution broke out in November 2013. The main principle was to give universities greater freedom from the Ministry of Education, led at that time by Serhiy Tabachnyk, a crony of ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych.
The law could have been more radical, Andrey Meleshevych, the president of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, told the Kyiv Post. But it has made a difference.
According to Volodymyr Bugrov, pro-rector of Kyiv’s Taras Shevchenko University, the majority of the representatives of academic councils are elected by teachers and students, decentralizing power from the rector.
But there are still problems to be ironed out. The law supposedly gives universities more control over their finances, but is contradicted by other laws. Bugrov also gave the example of the clause on student approval being needed to appoint pro-rectors. “There are no details in the law that say how this should be done,” he said.
Corruption still visible
Despite improvements, Oleksandr Bogomolov, the director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, told the Kyiv Post that the changes could not be described as reforms until there is a visible reduction in corruption and quality improved in Ukrainian universities.
There are still hundreds of fake universities and “diploma mills,” according to Irina Yehorchenko, a researcher at Ukraine’s Institute of Mathematics and also a member of the Reanimation Package of Reforms, a coalition of non-governmental organizations. She says that the current system reflects the Soviet and post-Soviet view of education as a box to tick on a career path, rather than a system for acquiring knowledge.
“The American dream is a house and car. The Ukrainian dream is a diploma,” Yehorchenko told the Kyiv Post.
Kvit told the Kyiv Post that the ministry has so far closed down 100 out of 1,000 higher educational institutions in the country.
The main issue for Yehorchenko is the quality of teaching. Specifically, she highlights one of the main forms of assessments for undergraduates, essays known as referats. Students are told to copy chunks of text to answer set questions, but many completed examples can just be downloaded from the Internet. Teachers are not expected to really read what the students produce, says Yehorchenko.
Bugrov of Taras Shevchenko University told the Kyiv Post, however, that there is a wide variation in quality in Ukrainian universities and his university uses European Union standards and guidelines.
“Our students have won Olympiads in physics, maths and biology. That means that they have the knowledge to compete at the international level,” said Bugrov.
Research budget cuts
Meanwhile, more than 1,000 academics of the National Academy of Sciences protested on April 19 against a cut in their budget — they are to receive approximately 70 percent of what they did in 2015.
The academy is an autonomous, umbrella structure for hundreds of government-funded research institutes created in Soviet Ukraine. But its 35,000 or so academics, who carry out pure research and create the bulk of teaching materials for Ukrainian universities, say that the government is thinking only in terms of money, not knowledge.
Larysa Spytsypa of the Institute of Archaeology told the Kyiv Post that employee hours have been cut there to part time in order to maintain staffing levels.
“They say they have no money because of the war,” said Spytsypa. “But they have money for other things.”
Yehorchenko, for instance, points to the fact that there are government officials who are paid to routinely make an inventory of the number of chairs in her department.
Funding headaches
Some members of the academy want the new law on sciences, only due to be implemented in 2020, to come into effect now. It promises 1.7 percent of the state budget will be spent on research but it will force researchers to compete for government funding and will stipulate the need for shared master’s and Ph.D. programs, thereby promoting more integration. At present all institutes receive equal funding.
“We need to understand where we are the leaders, and to finance the areas where we can be leaders,” Kvit told the Kyiv Post on April 19. “Obviously we will still fund fundamental sciences, even if it doesn’t bring profit.”
Meleshevych says that academics do not have to rely on state funding. “There are the European Union’s Erasmus, Tempus and Horizon 2020 scientific cooperation and funding programs,” he said.
But Bogomolov, the director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, said it’s not easy. “The world has lived without Ukraine, and it can continue to do so.” He worries that institutes will be starved of funding by 2020. He, for example, is Ukraine’s only specialist in Arabic linguistics.
Debate on integration
Members of the academy say that Kvit’s integration policy, which has so far not been put into effect, doesn’t take into account the realities of Ukrainian universities.
“What benefit do I have in joining a university, when I’m going to have a boss who is going to push me around? Instead of doing research, (I will have to) go and teach extra hours,” said Bogomolov. Yehorchenko agreed, describing rectors as directors of “state companies.”
But Meleshevych sees integration as a key part of the coming educational changes. The new minister, Liliia Hrynevych, “is extremely qualified, but she has to continue these unpopular measures in order to take our science out of the hole that we are currently in, and to bring it closer to the light,” said Meleshevych. “It will be painful, and some people will lose their jobs.”
