Building Inclusive Higher Education: Ukrainian Perspectives from a CIVICA Workshop

Rethinking University Responsibility

The workshop also resonated with Olena Polishchuk, Associate Professor at the Department of Entrepreneurship, Corporate and Spatial Economics at Vasyl’ Stus Donetsk National University. She describes it as a prompt to rethink the university’s role through concrete managerial decisions and their real consequences. “Throughout the workshop, I repeatedly found myself reflecting on the fact that inclusion in European universities has long ceased to be the domain of isolated programs or ‘additional activities.’ Instead, it is increasingly understood as an integral part of the university’s responsibility to society, even when this entails complex organisational and financial decisions,” she says.

A particularly meaningful aspect was meeting students and alumni of Sciences Po’s refugee programs. “Their personal accounts of studying, adapting and pursuing further professional paths made it possible to see the outcomes of university policies not through indicators or reports, but through human trajectories shaped over time,” she explains.

As an economist, Dr Polishchuk also focused on the sustainability of inclusion programs. “During the discussions, I deliberately focused on the question of which mechanisms enable universities to involve the business sector in supporting refugee programs and whether financial or tax incentives play a role in these models. This perspective made it possible to view inclusion not merely as a cost, but as an investment with a delayed yet tangible impact,” she says.

Equally valuable, she notes, was the informal dimension of the workshop. “Conversations outside the formal sessions, the exchange of doubts and questions without prepared answers, offered much deeper insight into the real challenges universities face across different countries and how they seek to balance academic quality, safety and social responsibility.”

Supporting Students in Challenging Contexts

For Olga Kupets, Associate Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics, inclusion is inseparable from her daily work. She teaches students from diverse backgrounds, including internally displaced persons, combatants and ex-combatants and students with disabilities. “Inclusivity is an integral part of my work,” she explains, noting that its importance has only grown with Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.

Kupets attended the workshop to explore approaches for supporting students facing multiple challenges, particularly refugees in France and other EU member states. She found the session by Frederik Smets, Supporting Refugee Learners in Higher Education, especially valuable. It gave her “a good summary of which barriers refugees have and how these barriers can be removed [and] addressed by the international community”.

What Kupets found most valuable was the sense of belonging. “Engaging with peers from other CIVICA universities reinforced that Ukrainian institutions are part of the European academic community,” she says. “Even though we don’t need to address the challenges related to refugee students and professors now, this issue can appear on our agenda immediately.” She adds, “Hence, the experience of our peers from other CIVICA universities is very important for us.”

Strengthening European Cooperation

Together, these reflections underline the role of CIVICA as more than a platform for policy transfer. For Ukrainian participants, the Inclusion Workshop offered a space to test ideas against lived realities and affirm Ukraine’s place in a wider European conversation about what inclusive universities can and should be.