Having worked at the original Harvard and now teaching at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, which is as close as Ukraine can come to the august institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I have to applaud the move by forward-looking businesspeople to create an endowment for Ukraine’s Sorbonne of the Dnipro. Of course, latter day Ukrainian counterparts of John Harvard cannot do things quite the same way as they are done on the banks of the River Charles. The Harvard endowment at over $9 billion is the world’s largest and a model of institutional investment, basically in blue-chip stocks designed to minimize risk and ensure a stable income in perpetuity. Ukraine simply lacks such investment opportunities because of its overall dismal business climate and collecting bank interest is about the best one can do. And, of course, rewarding outstanding teachers is laudable. We might not be paid much in money, but dealing with the best and the brightest, who will have to turn this country around if anybody ever does so, is worth a king’s ransom. I am proud of my students, and hope that in intellectual terms I am giving them what they will need.
Perhaps all good things start small, and rewarding a handful talented instructors an extra seventy or so dollars a month is admittedly a modest attainment, but as a precedent it is difficult to overestimate its importance. The Kiev-Mohyla Academy is itself a tribute to the energy and idealism of its president (Vyacheslav Biukhovetsky), the Ukrainian diaspora, and other farsighted benefactors like George Soros. One can only hope that with time the nascent Kiev-Mohyla endowment will come to rival Harvard’s. It is one thing in Ukraine truly worthy of investment. In writing about contemporary Ukraine, all too often my mind inevitably wanders to Marx’s phrase from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , “the dead hand of all the past generations that hangs like a curse on the brow of the living,” which is as good a definition as any of all we here call Sovdepia. In the Podil section of Kyiv, everything possible is being done to lift that dead hand from the brow of the future. Those who support this will earn the gratitude of a nation that can finally, thanks in no small measure to such efforts, become what it deserves to be, a far cry from what it now is. One can only hope with Thomas Paine, “The birthday of a new world is at hand.” If so, its future parents are now at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy. I for one am proud to know them.
