But this is where the resemblance ends. Once you’re in, you find yourself in the warm and comfortable surroundings of a very modern building, much like a decent hotel and nothing like the dingy, stinky dorms of my student days. The contrast is exacerbated by the sound of prayer somewhere in the depth of the building – or is my mind playing tricks on me?

This is my first time in Lviv’s UCU, the place I have heard so much about. Most of my knowledge is about conflicts between this young private university and the backward Education Ministry, and stories told by professors and managers who have made this place work since 2002, when the school was inaugurated.

By now, it has grown to have two sights, more than 850 students, a ratio of staff to full-time students of 1:3, a popular business school, and lots of ambitions. It’s still a boutique, not a supermarket, and one with a mission. It aims to be an open academic environment to raise the future professional elite in the Christian tradition.

My little investment was supposed to be a series of master classes to some 50 students of the master’s program journalism, as well as to a small group of students arriving from other universities around the country. My subject was Western standards of journalism and how to work by them in Ukraine.

I was invited through a donor-financed program that gives the students fantastic exposure to the reality of the profession they picked through the eyes of seasoned veterans from Ukraine and other countries like Poland, Russia and Germany. They tell the aspiring journalists about the fun, the conflicts and the daily grind of their chosen profession.

These master classes and other similar programs only take about 20 percent of the students’ time. The rest goes into practical assignments. They have to write from day one of J-school, and 10 percent of their performance mark is composed of successfully published stories in Ukrainian media. 

This is very different from a typical journalism school in Ukraine, where boring theoretical courses by elderly professors take up much of the curriculum. There are 10,000 new journalists churned out of that system every year, according to 2010 Education Ministry data. That’s more than enough to staff all the oligarch-owned media with cannon fodder.

As the beautiful congress hall of UCU was filling with students, I thought that this little university is daring at least to provide a very different learning environment and curriculum structure to its students. It was getting the form right, I thought. Let’s look at the essence.

Even before my class started, I was challenged by a group of students from eastern Ukraine, who said working by Western standards in a Ukrainian newsroom is impossible because of censorship. My point was you have to try if you know what to do.

I talked about things that to me seem like a bread and butter of journalism: editing and fact-checking, basic story structure and practical solutions to common ethical dilemmas. Curiously, the overwhelming reaction from the hall was shock – from students and from some of the young, bright-eyed staff and teachers.

They said that much of what they heard was new to them. Notably, one of those things was the “nut graf” – a paragraph close to the beginning of the story that explains to the reader the importance of the subject of the story and the scope of the problem.

The “nut graf,” or main idea, is common in any Western-style story bigger than a tiny news item, but does not at all occur in Ukraine. It simply has not yet arrived here. Later, some professors from the same university told me that an equivalent problem exists in academic writing, where Ukrainian standards have not progressed in decades.

Student reactions ranged from skepticism of those who thought that Western standards are only applicable in the Kyiv Post and in the offices of Western media in Ukraine, to those who seemed keen to challenge their own knowledge and habits.

Otar Dovzhenko, one of the teachers at UCU’s journalism master program, said that those standards caused a huge debate in the classroom once I was gone – possibly the greatest compliment for my work. He also said the class made him start to reconsider what standards Ukrainian journalists should be learning in their school.

The point I tried to make is that high reporting and writing standards are professional equivalents of morality. It should not matter if the people around you are using them, they have to sit in your head and guide your own work. I am grateful to the Ukrainian Catholic University for allowing me to pass on the message. I cross my fingers and hope it will stick.

Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected].