Professor Mark S. Johnson
Department of Educational Policy Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
July 18, 2011
I was very impressed by the overall organization as well as by many of the individual presentations that were given during the recent conference on the “Social Sciences, Humanities and Higher Education in Eastern Europe,” which was held in Vilnius, Lithuania on June 14-16, 2011. This gathering was hosted by the private European Humanities University (EHU), and despite the tremendous difficulties the university has faced, including repression in Belarus since its founding in 1992, and the strains of its physical dislocation to Lithuania in 2004, EHU has endured, and has generated enough financial support from U.S. and European donors to survive.
In fact, even in exile EHU remains a remarkably vibrant intellectual and scholarly community, which was on full display during the recent conference in Vilnius. My cumulative impression of the work that was on display during the recent conference was that graduate students and scholars in the region have fully joined in international scholarly debates; their work was thoughtfully informed by sophisticated research methodologies and wide-ranging interdisciplinary approaches; and that scholars in the U.S. and Europe should pay more attention to the often very innovative comparative work coming out of the region in fields such as history, anthropology, political science, philosophy, and cultural studies. Furthermore, EHU maintains a vitally important series of publications, including research monographs and serials that may constitute the most vital and multi-lingual stream of such peer-reviewed scholarship anywhere in the region. While the borderlands between Poland, the Baltic region, Belarus, and Ukraine may be fraught with very contentious and often bloody history, that same cross-cultural richness and its “border crossings” are also informing increasingly rich research and education that seeks to interrogate and illuminate those complex histories in new ways, and to offer insights into contemporary social and public policy choices throughout the region.
I was also struck by the ways in which the histories of universities often seem to mimic or parallel the histories of nations – the necessary role of distinctive leaders (such as EHU’s Anatoli Mikhailov, who led the effort to establish the institution as the first private university in Belarus, and who remains its guiding presence); the importance of a unifying sense of mission (such as EHU’s avowed vision of bringing world-class research and scholarship to bear upon the problems of economic and social development in Belarus and its surrounding region, and to model the vibrancy of a true liberal education); and the contingent ways in which such national or intellectual movements are continually “constructed” and often “reconstructed” by small groups of scholars and activists (in this case, a committed core of impressive faculty members), often in very difficult personal and financial circumstances (such as the involuntary exile of EHU).
The ultimate lesson here may be the vital importance of keeping a “spark” like EHU alive as a bridge back into the long-term transformation of higher education in Belarus, and as a “counter-culture” which in time could contribute in direct ways to political democratization and the revival of Belarusian civil society. Even as it struggles to maintain its institutional cohesion, to secure stable long-term funding, and to negotiate the tense politics surrounding the increasingly isolated regime in Belarus, EHU clearly remains a vital intellectual and scholarly community, and one that is richly deserving of continued international support as it pursues it agenda of remaining engaged in Belarus.
Copyright © EHU,