JENKINTOWN, Pennsylvania — A college that was started by Ukrainian nuns in 1947 to cater for post-war Ukrainian women refugees has grown into one of the most praised multicultural, coeducational colleges near Philadelphia, a city of 1.6 million people which prides itself on having one of the highest numbers of prestigious educational establishments in the U.S.
The Pennsylvania college in Jenkintown, with just 4,000 residents, is proud that its 750 students now come from all the ethnic backgrounds that make up American society. It strives to maintain a Ukrainian flavor, but the college now only has a handful of students of Ukrainian background, around 10 from Ukraine itself.
However, it wants to increase its ties with Ukraine and would like to attract more students from there, something the college president, Jonathan Peri, believes will enrich the educational experience for both Americans and Ukrainians.
Manor College has its roots in the work of three nuns from the Basilian order of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) who arrived in the U.S. in 1911 and established a full-time elementary school for the children of the many immigrants arriving in the state.
The sisters went on to establish English-language classes and an evening school system for Ukrainian immigrants, a printing and publishing house which produced a newspaper, an orphanage, and a carpet factory.
In the following years, they were instrumental in opening three Ukrainian high schools in New York city, Hamtramck in Michigan, and Fox Chase, Pennsylvania.
Located on a 35-acre campus, it is practically neighbors with a large Ukrainian social center and school that caters for Philadelphia’s substantial Ukrainian community.
The college offers more than 50 courses at pre-degree levels. But because it has performed so well and proved it can teach programs at a high level, the college has been granted the right to award Bachelor degrees in 15 of its subjects including two that the college has developed a reputation for excellence in – dental hygiene and veterinary technology programs.
Other subjects it caters to include accounting, business administration, psychology, criminal justice, law enforcement, liberal studies, computer studies, public policy and healthcare.
The cultural stamp of its Ukrainian founders clearly remains in the college buildings. Walking around the corridors and lecture halls you notice Ukrainian trident symbols and crosses, and prints, paintings and historic photos of Ukrainian-related subjects. The library and bookshelves in classrooms contain books in Ukrainian and the English-language about Ukraine.
Peri, the college’s president since 2015, said because of its “unique identity as America’s only accredited institution of higher education founded by Ukrainian Catholic sisters,” Manor College has a strong sense of obligation to explore recent and ongoing global events about Ukraine as well as an abiding interest in preserving Ukrainian culture.
To that end, the college organizes “dialogues” where members of the local community are invited to learn about topical issues in discussions with experts on Ukraine.
Recent such events have covered Russian aggression in the Kerch Strait, the recognition of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church, the Kremlin’s war in eastern Ukraine, and its use of cyber-warfare. Peri said: “We invite all of our community, Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians, anyone who wants to hear about what we have to say on Ukraine. Our guests have included Congresspeople, diplomats, religious leaders, and business executives.”
College’s core Ukrainian mission
The college for years advocated for recognition by the Pennsylvania government as genocide the Holodomor, the Soviet-engineered artificial famine which killed four million Ukrainians between 1932-33. The efforts resulted in the Holodomor being placed on the teaching curriculum of Pennsylvania’s school system.
One of the campus buildings houses the Ukrainian Heritage Studies Center. Its curator, Chrystyna Prokopovych, told the Kyiv Post it was established in 1977 because part of the colleges “core mission” was to promote and perpetuate Ukrainian culture and traditions.
The center, which recently received a makeover using funds from private American donors of Ukrainian origin, is open to the public and visitors come from far beyond the Philadelphia area, often from Ukraine.
The exhibits are intended to reflect the early life of Ukrainian immigrants in America and tell stories about not only the objects but about their owners and how they came to be in the U.S.
Part of a room shows how 19th-century immigrants often recreated in their new homes the styles and objects of the rural lives they mostly came from in Ukraine. There is a whitewashed clay oven that doubles as a warm sleeping place, and instruments for creating woolen thread for weaving and wooden cylinders to turn milk into butter.
Another exhibit is a patterned, handwoven blanket that was made by a Ukrainian woman political prisoner, Paraskevia Kravets, condemned by Soviet occupiers to the Siberian Gulags because of her Ukrainian patriotism. She kept it with her when she was freed and eventually came to the U.S.
Yet another item is a colorful dress from 1921 decorated with patterns and made by the wife of a Ukrainian coal miner, among the thousands that flocked to Pennsylvania from the 1890s onward.
Some ceramics on display were made in post-war camps that were home after World War II in Germany and Austria for tens of thousands of displaced Ukrainians who did not want to return to their homes that had been swallowed by the tyrannical police state of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Many of those people, said Prokopovych, came to Philadelphia and entered the college which was designed to teach English and provide an education for young Ukrainian women who might not otherwise have been able to enter American establishments until they had proven language skills.
The center offers classes for those seeking to learn how to create traditional Ukrainian colorfully-patterned Easter eggs or to embroider. It also organizes entertaining courses for children as young as 5-years-old to learn about Ukraine and its language.
U.S. and Ukrainian classrooms linked by Skype
The college is keen for Ukrainian students to study there and looking for ways to generally increase cooperation with Ukrainian educational institutions.
Peri said that to achieve that “We have some broad agreements with some Ukrainian institutions like the Karpatsky University in the Carpathian Mountains and we’re also co-teaching a course on history, live, with a class at Lviv’s Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU).”
The person in charge of the idea to hold synchronized classes in the U.S. and Ukraine is senior academic and historian Nicholas Rudnytzky. He said that he and his opposite numbers in Ukraine would use Skype to talk and see each other in real time.
Rudnytzky said that details of the content and how best to accommodate the seven-hour time difference between Pennsylvania and Ukraine were still being worked out but he was optimistic the innovative scheme would begin later this year. He said his own students were looking forward to meeting their Ukrainian “virtual” classmates when the experiment begins.
The Skype classrooms are just one of the ways the college is exploring new ways of exploiting its Ukrainian connections and background.
Peri noted that the newly-appointed Metropolitan (senior cleric) in the UGCC in America is Archbishop Borys Gudziak, the driving force behind the creation of UCU and its president. Peri was on the executive committee for the Metropolitan’s enthronement in Philadelphia last month and with a knowing smile, he said: “I think it’s absolutely likely that we will have closer cooperation with UCU in all sorts of projects.”
