Brain gain: Universities worldwide step up to help Ukrainian scholars

Svetlana Tarasova had planned on lecturing to her students at a university in Kharkiv and celebrating a friend’s birthday on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine. Instead she awoke to explosions and howling car alarms.

After spending two weeks in a bomb shelter, she started making her way in jammed traffic to the Polish border. Dr. Tarasova explains that by “a lucky chance or part of a miracle,” a professor in London, whom she knew from a scholarly association, contacted her and helped her apply, while on the road, for a position in Poland to give her stability once she arrived. 

“Thanks to [the] people around [me], it is going on well. Still my mind is always thinking about Ukraine, Kharkiv and other cities,” writes Dr. Tarasova in an email from Warsaw, where she is working at the Polish Academy of Sciences conducting research. “How to return to normal life? How to return to joy, happiness, learn to smile. Now I am trying to find out how to do it again.” 

Members of the global higher education community are rallying to help scholars who have left Ukraine or who are internally displaced after Russia invaded six weeks ago. Their assistance offers a lifeline to fleeing residents, but also promises less interruption to Ukrainian scholarship. The endeavors – which range from securing jobs and housing to assisting with enrollment in universities – showcase an upwelling of humanitarian spirit and, in some cases, are leading to efforts to create better institutional processes to help students and scholars from Ukraine and other conflict zones like Afghanistan and Yemen.

“It’s something we thought was just the right thing,” says Maciej Maryl, outreach coordinator for one of the initiatives, #ScienceforUkraine, and director of the Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He helped start the project with other European scholars soon after the invasion. “We feel we had some contacts in Ukraine before, we feel they are part of the European scholarly community, and we want to show that these networks are strong. We’re doing what we can to stand with them.” 

At #ScienceforUkraine, over 80 volunteers in 32 countries share information about paid positions, transfer opportunities, or accommodation offers. Elsewhere, a separate Google document started by a researcher has gathered more than 2,000 opportunities worldwide for academic support for Ukrainian scientists.

Efforts to assist students are also underway. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology started a program called Yulia’s Dream to train Ukrainian high school students in honor of a young Ukrainian mathematician recently killed in the war. The University of Chicago announced full-tuition scholarships for Ukrainian undergraduates affected by the invasion.

At Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, the president’s office recently convened meetings of faculty and staff members interested in creating systems to help people from Ukraine and other conflict zones. 

“It’s looking at structures and our expertise and what WPI has to offer to help,” says Renata Konrad, an associate professor of operations and industrial engineering at WPI, who returned in January from serving as a Fulbright scholar in Lviv, Ukraine. 

Dr. Konrad informally recruited colleagues at WPI to remotely advise 11 students at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv on their capstone projects after hearing from contacts that the university still offered remote learning but lacked sufficient instructors due to professors joining the military. Twice a week, Dr. Konrad meets via video call with her advisee, who is sometimes in a bomb shelter. The student’s capstone is on inventory management study based on her volunteer work at her university helping to sort and disperse donations flooding in from abroad.

Olga Polotska, executive director of the National Research Foundation of Ukraine, emphasizes the importance to the country of Ukrainian scientists continuing to work. “Researchers are the ones who develop new knowledge,” she says, speaking from the outskirts of Kyiv on a darkened Zoom call, to obey evening blackout orders. “This is the most important thing. New knowledge is the basis for development.”

Dr. Polotska and her staff are calling on international institutions to make efforts to help not only Ukrainians forced to leave, but those who remain. They compile assistance offers on their website. 

“Since not all Ukrainian scientists are able to leave or willing to leave Ukraine … remote fellowships would be a very good solution,” she says. “Every day we receive more offers with remote positions.”

An “unprecedented” need

Scholars at Risk, a network that links scholars in need with institutions globally, has received roughly 200 applications from Ukrainian scholars since the war started, along with another 200 applications from Russian scholars, and expects more to come. That’s nearly as many applications as the organization received in the entire past academic year, but not as many as they’ve received from scholars in Afghanistan – nearly 1,500 – since the Taliban gained control in August.  

“The level of need is unprecedented,” says Chelsea Blackburn Cohen, acting director of network and university relations at Scholars at Risk, housed at New York University. 

Threats to academics have been rising for years with conflicts in Afghanistan, Yemen, Myanmar, and Cameroon, among others, says James King, director of the Scholar Rescue Fund at the Institute for International Education in New York. Between 2016 and 2021, applications to the fund more than doubled. 

“The world and the international higher education community, we’ve all turned our focus on the war in Ukraine, with very good reason, but I do think it’s really important that we don’t forget or neglect our colleagues from across the globe,” says Mr. King. “There are more threatened and displaced scholars today than ever before.” 

Some institutions are working on expanding their ability to help people in need. At the University of Pittsburgh, a small, three-person team at the Global Studies Center started the Pittsburgh Network for Threatened Scholars in 2019, a partnership between university departments, city nonprofits, and private businesses. The network grew from two scholars to 11 currently on campus, with plans for at least four more scholars from Afghanistan to arrive this fall. 

Veronica Dristas, associate director of the Global Studies Center, is working with other regional colleges and universities to start an expanded network to collaborate on hosting scholars. 

Schools need to be prepared to offer holistic support like housing and health care, she says. In return, scholars aid their host campuses by bringing their expertise and worldview.  

“It’s a goodwill gesture, but it’s also beneficial to the university to have renowned scholars coming and staying some time with us and giving them the opportunity to build a curriculum here in the U.S.,” she says.

Plans to return

Some scholars who have left Ukraine are already thinking about when they’ll return. Maryana Sytar was working on her doctoral studies at the Koretsky Institute of State and Law of the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv when the war started. Her advisor urged her to apply for a new emergency fellowship fund offered to Ukrainian graduate students by Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Ms. Sytar applied and received an offer including full tuition and a living stipend for a six-month stay on campus. She arrived in Tel Aviv on March 17. 

“I hope I will gain a positive experience that can be effectively applied in my country,” Ms. Sytar writes in an email. At the end of the Russian invasion, she adds, “the priority tasks will be not only the development of our country in terms of rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure facilities ... but also the enrichment of Ukraine’s intellectual resources.” 

Dr. Tarasova, who keeps busy with her job and exploring Warsaw, doesn’t know how long she’ll be out of Ukraine. “I do not want to set any certain plans or limit myself by time. Life has taught me that it is impossible to plan something,” she writes over email. “I dream of seeing my Ukraine modern, stable and prosperous, united and friendly, in which all the best is in the near future.”