UvA professor Ellen Rutten wants European university for refugee academics
Ellen Rutten, professor of Slavic literatures and chair of the UvA department of modern foreign languages and cultures, is working with a group of academics to establish a European university for researchers who had to flee their countries. ‘A Russian student of a colleague is now being tortured in Russia.’
Whether we could call a little later than planned, Ellen Rutten, chair of the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at the UvA, asked. The morning was hectic and full, with emotional appointments as well. ‘There’s a lot of breaking down in tears these days,’ she says, when she calls back a little later. ‘We have many contacts in the area, for us the war feels very close.’
After Russia invaded Ukraine on Wednesday, students and staff in the Russian and Slavic Studies department are unsettled. The area of the war is home to many former students, colleagues and friends of students. Earlier this week, Rutten spoke with a friend from Russia who also ‘couldn’t deal with the situation at all’, she says. ‘The suffering there is also very great. Just think of the Russian boys who have to go into the army.’
How did you look at the news developments this week?
‘I find it very difficult and confusing, like everyone else. I have been following for a long time the work of journalists and researchers in the region who give important updates, but I saw these days that even they were wrong - such good analysts, with so much experience. We did not expect this, and we are shocked at the amount of grief and pain that is being created all at once.’
How is it that no one saw this coming, do you think?
‘I think, and I hear this from other experts, that Putin’s anger and personal resentment is playing out much more strongly than people expected. He has been asserting himself for years but was always seen as a ruthless and at the same time rational autocrat. Now you see him acting from a feeling that was not so present before. There is nostalgia for a great Russian empire, and his reaction may also have to do with his own frustration at the moment the Wall fell - it was very intimidating for him, he was in a KGB office in East Germany at the time. Imperial nostalgia is a broader problem in Russia, but there is also a personal tragedy at play here, which is the best explanation at the moment in this hectic situation.’
Earlier you had begun to establish a new university for fugitive researchers from countries dangerous to academics such as Russia. What is the status of that now?
‘Since the summer we have been very active, we have almost daily mail contact with a group of researchers from Europe and from the United States - a fine group of enormous go-getters. We are looking into setting up a new university where some of the places are reserved for researchers in need from Russia, Belarus and now Ukraine. Refugee students are also welcome, especially now that it is clear that they are in acute need, although students from Ukraine also had a hard time before this due to a lack of money, among other things. The university is to become a new knowledge institute: the University of New Europe. There are several trans-European universities, but the latest developments call for us to create an additional university, where large numbers of refugees can go at the same time. I notice at the UvA that people are certainly not unwilling to bring a researcher here under a refugee scheme, but it is often difficult, the competition is fierce and there are a lot of countries with problems.‘
Will there be a physical place for this university?
‘The intention is to do so. While we have become very handy with Zoom due to the corona crisis, and we can certainly offer online lectures, the goal is to create a physical place where anyone can go and apply for a scholarship. It’s not yet clear where the university will be located, but we are finding that there are parts of Europe where there is serious interest in housing the university. We do try to ensure that it does not become an anti-Russia place with a clear political dimension; as a research institute you do not want to become a political instrument. An interesting country is Germany, for example, where there are foundations and NGOs that help us a lot. We’ve already gotten a summer school funded, and there’s a plan for five master’s programs.’
When it comes to refugee researchers, they can come from all sorts of research fields, I suppose.
‘The founders are mostly from the Social Sciences and Humanities corner, you can see that in the programming. We have a program focused on communication and media and one on public health and health humanities, in which we train students in developing health policies that take cultural differences into account. A politician from the Baltic States with whom we consulted said that this cultural-historical knowledge is now not taken into account enough in, for example, corona communication policy.’
Would students from the Netherlands also be welcome to study at such a university?
‘Yes, we think it is very important that it does not become a kind of ghetto where people sit together on their little island. We want it to be an institution that really offers answers to the major European challenges of our time: the climate crisis, health crisis and also this geopolitical crisis. It is important to show that there is not a pathetic Eastern Europe that needs to be helped by Western Europe, because right now the whole of Europe is in crisis. Of course we reserve places for researchers from countries where it is really very difficult to be an academic, but we also want to welcome students from the Baarsjes, or from Nieuwegein, or from Italy, if they find the program interesting.’
How big will this university become?
‘In the long term it is difficult to determine the number of students. We are now comparing ourselves with, for example, the Central European University in Vienna and the European University Institute in Florence, although the latter only offers PhD positions and master’s programs. This should be a mature university. We are thinking of a first modest step in the short term of about a hundred master’s students and ten staff members. Actually, our initiative is very pessimistic: we assume that there will be problems for years to come, so we hope that we can set this up quickly and build it up from there.’
The Russian and Slavic Studies program has let students know that they can contact lecturers if they need support. Starting next week, the study teams of Russian and Slavic Studies and Eastern European Studies also want to organize a series of lectures in which researchers, journalists and writers talk about what is going on and offer those interested the opportunity to ask questions. The lectures are intended to be accessible to everyone and, according to Rutten, also have an explicitly emotional function.
And the money?
‘Last night I lay awake and suddenly thought: this is a moment when crowdfunding can also be interesting. Everyone is worried. Until now we were mainly working on a combination of smaller funds and talks with the European Commission - the latter is an interesting place, but serious fundraising takes a long time there and is also bureaucratic. We are also consulting with politicians on how best to do this, which also takes time. Some countries have also offered non-financial resources, such as buildings.’
When should this new university open its doors?
‘In an ideal scenario, we would start the master’s program in the fall or no later than January. Then within three years you can have a developed bachelor’s degree standing. It is not about months, rather years. Parallel programs are therefore very important. I saw a message last week from our co-founder Alexander Etkind from Florence. He told me that a Russian researcher with whom he has worked a lot was arrested and tortured, and is now lying unconscious in a police cell. That is so bad. We have to think about how we can provide as much support as possible in the short term.
I think it’s very important that we also act on that as the UvA - UvA researchers from Belarus and Ukraine sometimes have nowhere to go. For the university administration, I think that’s a complicated question - there are other countries in the world that are struggling as well - but I still hope that we can now connect people more actively to the UvA with individual research grants and that we can accommodate them here.’
