An important event took place in Lutsk last Monday as the Volyn National University was marking its 15th anniversary. Named after the celebrated fellow countrywoman Lesia Ukrainka, it received the national status last year, but 15 years ago a state university was launched on the basis of Lutsk Pedagogical Institute. Meanwhile, the tradition of intellectual quest has existed for centuries in Volyn, dating from the famous brotherhood school and Halshka Hulevychivna.
Volyn State University’s first rector Prof. Anatolii SVIDZYNSKY recalls the winding and thorny road the former pedagogical institute had to travel before its official status was changed.
Svidzynsky: This is an extremely important event, something for which both the president of Ukraine and the institute staff were not prepared in 1993. People were used to a certain status quo, so why change anything? Besides, there was an extremely difficult situation in Ukraine, a crisis was unfolding. If they didn’t establish a state university that year, the following year they would have had too many other problems to cope with and the matter would have been shelved for a long while. Unfortunately, the festivities were not attended by Academician Ihor Yukhnovsky, to whom Volyn owes its state university. His arguments — that Ukraine was now an independent country and that Volyn had a different strategic status as a border region — worked. We could not have an educational vacuum here, what with the neighboring powerful Polish universities. We had to meet the challenge with a new cultural, educational, scholarly force.
Volyn today appears unthinkable without a university, doesn’t it?
Our scientists and scholars were now able to work on a previously inaccessible level. Such a university must find its place as en economic entity in a region of a country with a market economy and private property. We are moving in this direction. Recently we had an interesting roundtable entitled “University, Science, Power, and Business: Together.” We saw there were opportunities of extensive cooperation. Now the national status implies numerous obligations — first and foremost, serving the national interests. Above all, we discovered many talented young people eager to receive a truly professional kind of training. They are the future of Volyn and the rest of Ukraine.
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During a ceremonious meeting of the academic council, kept in the classical style, with the teaching staff clad in gowns, a group of research fellows of the Lesia Ukrainka University received awards of the Ministry of Education and Science, regional and city state administrations. The university, in recognition of meritorious support, awarded Academician Mykola Zhulynsky, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Consul General Tomasz Janik of the Republic of Poland in Lutsk, and a number of businesspeople from Volyn. Larysa IVSHYNA, member of Volyn National University’s Supervisory Board, editor in chief of The Day, who is besieged by journalists whenever she visits, said that Lesia Ukrainka University is “a center of reading public that has, fortunately, been preserved in Ukraine... I think that our universities must revive our reading tradition, when people not only look through comic strips but also read serious newspapers.”
Volyn National University is a regional one, considering its location, and it might well feel isolated from intellectual life in the rest of Ukraine, but it is not so. This institution of higher learning has reached a level where it in many respects matches any university in the capital city and is, in fact, a trendsetter in the educational realm. Four institutes, 14 faculties, a student body of 14,000, 42 majors — this is a sequel to the intellectual thought in Volyn that numbers far more than 15 years (more, in fact, than 68 years, considering the date of the foundation of Lutsk Pedagogical Institute). It numbers centuries because the brotherhood school appeared in Lutsk before the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. It was in Volyn that such celebrated Ukrainians as Viacheslav Lypynsky and Lesia Ukrainka lived and worked...
The whole city seemed to take part in the university festivities; there were sports competitions, a concert of Ukrainian rock music, the launching of the excellent contemporary art exhibit Molodohrai-2008, and a university amateur photo exhibit.
Mykola Romaniuk, head of the Volyn regional state administration, presented the most important awards. Prof. Roman Artsyshevsky of the philosophy chair was conferred the prestigious title “Merited Worker of Science and Technology of Ukraine,” and the university rector, Prof. Ihor Kotsan, Ph.D. (Biology), received a diploma of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.
He made the university teaching staff and students happy when he announced that a student city would start being designed and perhaps even built this year (Den’ carried an interview on this subject with VNU rector Ihor Kotsan on May 17, 2008 {no. 85}).
