The war in Ukraine has had a ripple effect on higher education, forcing researchers to pause projects and cancel travel to both Russia and Ukraine, while the scientific community tries to determine the long-term impacts of the conflict on worldwide scholarship.
At the same time that many universities are cutting ties with counterparts in Russia, they are devising ways to help their displaced colleagues from Ukraine, most of whom at this point are women, since men are required to stay in Ukraine to defend the country.
At Tufts University, a class taught jointly by Russian and American professors was abruptly canceled when the university cut all ties with that country. At Boston College, study abroad trips to Russia, which were on pause during the pandemic, remain frozen. MIT recently cut ties with a graduate research university in Russia that it helped found a decade ago.
Meanwhile, researchers at Harvard who study Ukraine have put aside long-term projects to focus instead on helping their colleagues there.
“Even if the war ends tomorrow, there is so much damage, and at so many levels,” said Emily Channell-Justice, a Harvard anthropologist who for more than 10 years has studied social movements, young activists, and the education system in Ukraine. When the war began, she had just begun a second project and was supposed to travel to Ukraine this month.
Ukraine is known for its strong education system, with many prestigious universities and institutes. Experts said that because the educational infrastructure is so robust, many students and scholars do not need to travel outside the country to advance their educations. There were about 206 scholars from Ukraine working in the United States during the 2020-2021 academic year, according to the Institute of International Education, which tracks foreign student data, and about 1,800 Ukrainian students. Those numbers are likely lower than usual because of the pandemic.
Channell-Justice has long worked alongside Ukrainian scholars who were pivotal in helping her formulate her research. Now some of the young people she first met a decade ago are in the midst of completing their own PhDs. Some were conducting field work when the war broke out and dropped their studies to join the territorial defense or provide humanitarian aid.
Channell-Justice was last in the country in September and was supposed to be heading back in April to begin a new project about internally displaced people, focused on Ukrainian efforts to handle the displacement of people from territories occupied by Russia.
“Obviously that is completely derailed,” she said.
Now, as she watches the conflict from afar, keeping in contact with friends and colleagues in Ukraine, she is trying to write down memories from her trips there over the years, an imperfect record of how things were. She talks with other anthropologists who study Ukraine about what will happen to scholarship in the country.
“The kind of long-term implications on the knowledge production in Ukraine is really something many of us are concerned about, but also, we’re so helpless,” she said.
Scholars at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard are working on ways to get aid to Ukrainian academics who are now in other parts of Europe, said Tymish Holowinsky, the institute’s executive director.
Eventually, he said, they will try to bring some scholars to the United States, but that depends on several factors, including the political climate here.
There are many logistical hurdles, he said; the J1 visa, a common way for faculty to travel, requires applicants to be able to speak English, and also plan to eventually return home, which that might prove to be impossible for displaced Ukrainians. They could apply for refugee status, he said, but that process is longer and more complex.
There are also questions about fund-raising for such an effort, and about whether Russian scholars would be included in whatever programs are developed, as well as more basic conundrums, such as finding people who have been displaced.
“These are the questions we as a university are struggling with,” Holowinsky said. “There are a lot of unknowns at the moment.”
Experts say they still don’t know what the long-term impact of the conflict will be, both on Ukrainian students and scholars here and in Ukraine.
Some of the major academic institutes in the country are in the heavily occupied eastern portion of the country, experts said. The Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology in Kharkiv was damaged by Russian shelling.
The war has left dozens of Ukrainian students in Boston unsure of how, or whether, they will be able to continue their studies. A group of students at Northeastern has asked the school’s administration to let them continue their studies even though they are unsure if their parents back home can pay their bills.
“Many of us have been plunged into financial insecurity, unsure if we’ll be able to afford our basic needs,” the group wrote Northeastern president Joseph Aoun, asking for help with tuition, a temporary easing of academic requirements, and more awareness on campus about the conflict.
At Boston College, Tony Lin, an assistant professor of the Practice of Russian and Slavic studies and the Russian/Slavic coordinator, said he had planned to be in Russia during spring break but flights were canceled because of the air space closure.
Study abroad trips to Russia, he said, are “unlikely to resume anytime soon.”
At Tufts, the class co-taught by a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a professor in Russia had been timed so that American and Russian students could interact with each other over video conferencing, said Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School. Drezner was supposed to have traveled to Russia in March for a conference but it was canceled after the invasion of Ukraine.
Drezner said the professors and students were greatly frustrated.
“It is exactly when tensions between countries are rising that you want to maintain some kind of exchange of ideas and indeed that’s one of the reasons why we started the program,” he said.
Laura Krantz can be reached at laura.krantz@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @laurakrantz and on Instagram @laurakrantz.
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Ukraine conflict unsettles academia in Boston - The Boston Globe
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