Responding to the Ukrainian refugee crisis: the University as Community Sponsor

• In Event: Higher education in times of crisis and conflict

Proposal

Overview:
Refugee enrolment in higher education globally is troublingly low. In 2018, only 3% of refugees were enrolled in tertiary education, globally compared to 37% of non-refugee students (UN Refugee Education 2030). Low rates of primary school completion and limited resources has resulted in little attention to higher education within humanitarian structures. Seeking enrolment in higher education externally also presents numerous challenges. Refugee students often do not have access to the documentation they need to apply to colleges and universities. They are frequently seen as foreign nationals even in countries of first asylum, thereby making them subject to international fees. These countries may also prioritise national enrolment, resulting in fewer available spots for students (Dryden-Peterson, 2010). In addition to these practical challenges, living in situations of persistent instability may have severe impacts on mental and emotional health that hinder academic achievement.

With a few exceptions, post-secondary institutions have remained relatively uninvolved in supporting refugees. In this paper, we examine the exceptional response of University X, a large urban university in the United Kingdom, to the refugee crisis in Ukraine, as a case study of a unique account of universities’ role in responding to global injustices. Through semi-structured interviews, observations, and documentation, we explore the motivations, both normative and pragmatic, at the heart of University X’s rapid response to the crisis in Ukraine, and its commitment to becoming the first university in the UK to serve as a community sponsor for refugees worldwide. We analyse the political context, institutional processes, and individual ambitions that led to the development of this initiative and argue that that this response expands traditional conceptions of the mission of higher education institutions and presents a compellingly cosmopolitan vision of the purpose of universities in an increasingly precarious global society.

Methods:
We use a bounded, single holistic case study, drawing on three types of data: (1) interviews with senior administrators, faculty members and staff; (2) observations of public university events and private team meetings; and (3) document analysis of strategic plans, records, and public news articles produced by the sanctuary team. We bound the case beginning in March 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and ending in September 2022, when the refugee matching portal was launched. In July 2022, we completed a first round of in-person data collection, including 13 interviews. Our second round of data collection took place via Zoom during April and May 2023. We will conduct final interviews in August and September, 2023. Each interview was 60-90 minutes long. All interviews were recorded and then transcribed via Otter.ai. Using Atlas.ti, interview data and document analysis will be independently coded by each researcher to identify key themes related to the research questions.

This research is conducted in collaboration with the sanctuary team as an active community partner. In this capacity, we are regularly communicating with them about progress on the study, drafts, and ways this research can also support them.

Results:
We found that institutional and individual commitments helped to motivate the intervention. Institutionally, a tradition of “service” was traced to University X’s founding as a religious university, and though the nature and contours of this commitment have changed over the decades, stakeholders consistently describe an “ethos of service” as a central element of campus culture. This commitment allowed agents to mobilize other departments and gain more direct pathways to senior leadership support to develop the program. In addition, at an individual level, participants in our study treated global responsibility as extensive and obvious, that “of course” they had to launch supports for Ukrainian refugees quickly, and of course the university was well-positioned to do so. This shared overarching belief often allowed faculty and administrators bridge a range of different expertises to leverage for the rapid response. Despite this consensus, we found variation in how respondents felt their university should respond.

Even so, we also found a variety of environmental factors that catalyzed or short-circuited these ambitions, including finances, political constraints, and large bureaucracy. We hope that this case study of respondents’ commitments and challenges informs philosophy with an empirical example that the ceiling for democratic responsibility is higher than previously anticipated.

Implications:
We do not aim in this study to argue that this is the best or most important account of universities’ role in a democracy, nor do we argue that it applies to everyone. As Campus Compact outlines in its vision, different institutions can and should take different approaches to civic engagement depending on their history, resources, and so on (Gearan, 2005). Rather, we only seek to offer that a cosmopolitan version of universities’ aims is possible and to provide a more textured account of its normative commitments. Our hope, in this, is to expand both philosophical discourse on what universities can and should achieve in a context of global political and environmental crisis, as well as to offer practitioners – if nothing else – new ideas of how they can respond.

Authors

• Megan Bogia, Harvard University Graduate School of Education

• Alysha Banerji, Harvard University Graduate School of Education