UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — War upends nearly every aspect of life for the citizens caught in the conflict, including access to higher education and opportunities to develop the skills and dispositions necessary to participate fully in democratic life.
An effort to help Ukrainians achieve both despite the country’s ongoing invasion by Russia will receive the 2024 Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy.
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, almost 1,000 Ukrainian students have taken courses taught by hundreds of faculty from across Europe and beyond.
IUFU offers online courses as well as on-site summer and winter schools in Budapest, Hungary and Lviv, Ukraine. The program’s objective is help sustain intellectual growth in the midst of incredible hardships. Its leaders seek to help students develop “democratic resiliency.”
Courses include “Intellectual Debates in Modern Ukrainian History and Contemporary Public Sphere,” “Rethinking Nationalism: Conceptual Frameworks and Political Challenges” and “Sustaining Rule of Law and Democracy in Ukraine amid War and Post-War Reconstruction.”
While IUFU started during the current war, it draws from a tradition of “flying universities” formed by dissident scholars throughout Central Europe. There, too, scholars saw the free and organized pursuit of knowledge as an act of democratic defiance.
IUFU organizer Balázs Trencsényi, professor of history and director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, said the coursework is designed to mitigate the effects of the war on students' academic development and provide a framework to push back against autocracy.
“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."
IUFU’s principal host, Central European University, has faced its own challenges with authoritarian regimes. In 2019, the university relocated most of its operations from Budapest to Vienna, Austria, after a long legal battle with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán over the university’s ongoing criticism of the regime’s restrictions of civil rights.
As part of receiving the Brown Medal, IUFU's organizers and some of its students will write a book about their work to sustain democracy and their participation in an innovative educational model in the very face of the ongoing war. IUFU's leaders will also visit University Park this fall to receive the Brown Democracy Medal and present a public lecture on their work on Oct. 31.
IUFU is implemented through a network of partner institutions with the Imre Kertész Kolleg of the University of Jena acting as a co-host of a number of courses. Additional partners include the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and Ukrainian Catholic University. It is supported by the Open Society University Network, with co-funding from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst.
Established in 2014, the Brown Democracy Medal is funded by Larry and Lynne Brown to recognize new and innovative scholarship or practice in democracy. Both are Penn State alumni, and Larry is chair of the McCourtney Institute’s Board of Visitors.
The award’s previous recipients include the States United Democracy Center, Iranian human rights advocate Nasrin Sotoudeh and Desmond Meade, executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.