UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As the war raged outside their windows in Ukraine, thousands of students gathered inside on their laptops amid rolling power outages to continue their education amid rolling power outages.
Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU), an initiative of Central European University, started in spring 2022, just months after Russia’s initial invasion in February 2022. Since then, more than 1,000 Ukranian students have taken courses taught by hundreds of faculty from across Europe and beyond. IUFU offers online courses and on-site visits to Budapest, Hungary in the summer and winter.
The program is the recipient of the 2024 Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy in the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts. IUFU directors Balazs Trencsényi and Ostap Sereda will visit Penn State's University Park campus to receive the medal and present a lecture based on their forthcoming book “Invisible University for Ukraine: Essays on Democracy at War” at 4 p.m. Oct. 31 in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library.
Sereda, an associate professor in history at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, said that democracy is at the heart of IUFU’s mission.
“A central aim of IUFU became sustaining a pluralistic and democratic political and intellectual culture in Ukraine — bringing students with diverse life stories, linguistic and cultural practices, and political views into a common, welcoming space,” Sereda said, “Likewise, many IUFU classes reflected on the ways to preserve and relaunch democratic government during and after the war.”
While IUFU started during the current war in Ukraine, it draws from a tradition of invisible universities formed by dissident scholars throughout central Europe in the 1990s as countries like Hungary transitioned from communism to democracy at the end of the Cold War.
The coursework is designed to give students access to information that might not be available during wartime or under the control of an authoritarian government, said Trencsényi, professor of history and director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University.
“The idea of an invisible university is rooted in a long-term discussion about what to do with hybrid regimes who are ruining their own higher education, which we adapted to the Ukrainian situation, where the main problem was obviously not internal repression but external invasion," Trencsényi said. "We are working on extending it to contexts where autocratic regimes limited access to critical thinking in their academic system."
The Brown Democracy Medal lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, visit democracy.psu.edu/events.