Time to come home, Ukraine tells émigré scholars

Kyiv has urged scholars who fled during the Russian invasion to return, with the message: “Dear Ukrainians, it’s time to come home.”

Mychailo Wynnyckyj, the deputy minister of education and science, who is responsible for higher education, thanked European universities for providing sanctuary to academics and students when they needed it most, but asked them to stop recruiting the country’s top minds.

Speaking at the British Council’s Going Global conference, he said that European universities were offering leading Ukrainian researchers three-year fellowships with the potential to turn them into 10-year employment contracts. This, Dr Wynnyckyj said, was “soft encouragement of brain drain”.

“Risk of brain drain is something that the Ukrainian government is very, very concerned about at the moment,” he said.

“It’s something we should all acknowledge – there is a fine line between help and…recruitment.

“Very often what you see is several institutions that are recruiting our academics under the guise of providing help.”

Between February 2022 and November 2023, 57 higher education institutions in Ukraine were damaged and six were destroyed, according to government figures. Many academics have fled overseas.

Dr Wynnyckyj, an associate professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (NaUKMA), said that the government continued to encourage the mobility of students, but for no longer than one semester, even if this might seem “inhumane”.

Rather than a ticket to emigration, student mobility was a “short-term guest period” and, once it was finished, graduates had a responsibility to use their skills to support their homeland, the minister told the conference.

“To rebuild, and to win this war, we need our minds at home,” Dr Wynnyckyj said.

“We’re grateful for the opportunities…but right now we’re in a state where we’re starting to rebuild, and we need people.

“The message from our ministry is that, ‘Dear Ukrainians, it’s time to come home.’”

The session also heard from participants in the twinning initiative between UK and Ukrainian universities. It currently supports 164 Ukrainian institutions, with 110 of them partnered with British universities. Support has included faculty exchanges, access to databases and joint degrees.

Rachel Sandison, vice-principal for external relations at the University of Glasgow, said that the focus was on developing long-term, sustainable and equitable partnerships.

“It was all about brain gain but not brain drain,” she said. “We want those students to go back to Ukraine and succeed, so we kind of felt like we were caretaking these students on behalf of those universities.”

The twinning initiative has been coordinated by Cormack Consulting Group, whose chair, Charles Cormack, also spoke at Going Global.

“When Ukraine has defeated the Russians, there’s going to be a huge job of reconstruction and that job will fall quite largely on the shoulders of the university sector,” he said.

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com