Ukraine Students Leave War To Meet Professors In Budapest
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
BUDAPEST (Worthy News) – Dozens of students have arrived in Budapest from wartorn Ukraine to meet the teachers they knew online while studying in bomb shelters or other challenging locations.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Central European University (CEU) launched the online Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU) program for those whose studies were affected by the war.
From 21-27 January, IUFU’s Budapest Winter School grants 36 IUFU participants the opportunity “to gather in Budapest for an in-person learning and exchange experience”, the CEU told Worthy News.
“IUFU aims to facilitate discussions on reflecting the war experience and its implications for postwar reconstruction of culture and society,” added Ostap Sereda, academic director of the program.
Sereda, an associate professor of history at the Ukrainian Catholic University and a guest professor at CEU, said they want “to expose students to critical perspectives on Ukrainian cultural heritage.”
The program helps “prepare them for active participation in international public discussions,” he added.
GLOBAL CHALLENGES
The winter school’s theme, “Action and Reflection: Ukrainian Engagements with Global Knowledge Production,” unites students from various regions and institutions.
Among them are Ukrainian refugees who currently reside in eight different countries, organizers said.
Their week in Budapest complements IUFU’s seven courses on history, cultural heritage, society, law, and politics taught in the fall semester. “They will discuss the challenges posed upon national and global knowledge production by Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine,” the CEU explained.
Since IUFU began in 2022, “in the spring we had 140 students from 30 institutions, and 70 instructors; and 200 students in the fall,” noticed Balazs Trencsenyi, the CEU professor of history and an IUFU initiator.
“In 2023, altogether, we had 22 course directors, 190 lecturers, and 70 mentors worked with our 420 students,” he added. He hopes the growth of IUFU will continue as the war enters its third year.
The IUFU, founded by U.S. billionaire George Soros, is among the relatively few programs still offered by the CEU in Budapest.
MOVING AWAY
Most of the CEU’s study programs were forced to move to neighboring Austria after a dispute with Hungary’s government in recent years.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who, as a young man, accepted a Soros scholarship, views the billionaire nowadays as a liberal, pro-migrant businessperson with a political agenda.
The CEU counters that Soros has no direct influence over its programs.
Speakers at the university’s IUFU Budapest Winter School include Holly Case (Brown University), Andreas Kalyvas (The New School for Social Research), Michal Kopecek (Czech Academy of Sciences), Saira Mohamed (UC Berkeley School of Law), Olena Palko (Basel University), Simon Schlegel (International Crisis Group), and Iryna Shuvalova (University of Oslo).
“Topics include self-determination and liberal versus Illiberal modalities of nationalism, poetry, and war,” the CEU explained.
Other themes include “social transformations during the war, constitutionalism and the politics of exception, state and non-state violence, regimes of historicity in the 21st century, and many more,” the CEU added.
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