Illustration: Stefan Vecsey

Last semester, I organised a hybrid international guest lecture series in English literature for a Ukrainian colleague of mine at the National University ‘Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic’ in a city in the east of the country, close to the front line. With many researchers having left the country, the remaining staff are shouldering an increased workload in addition to coping with the impact of the war. Much of the international support for Ukrainian academics has been focused on research and on helping them to move abroad. I wanted to find a way to support those colleagues who have remained, especially in that crucial, common aspect of our work: teaching.

What I did not anticipate was the interest from people at the Ukrainian university who were not in literary studies. Many students and staff members from engineering, psychology, economics, robotics, translation and interpretation studies took time out from their day every week to join our humanities lecture. Almost every single lecture was disrupted by an air raid alarm during which students and staff had to take shelter, but the act of teaching connected us across disciplines and countries.

This experience underlined for me once more how quintessential teaching is to our academic work – or could be. Too much of the discourse and too many incentive structures in the university system have been skewed towards excellence in research. Yet teaching can anchor academia within society. It is through teaching that we are in constant, direct exchange with the broader community and the people around us. Our students will go into many different jobs and roles in society. They will carry with them disciplinary knowledge, analytical skills and the newest research insights. But they could also carry with them a profound understanding of the value of higher education and of the importance of academia’s role in society – provided that we convey this to them. By systemically undervaluing teaching, by failing to treat it with the respect that it deserves, we sabotage ourselves. If we do not set an example, how can we expect the rest of society to carry the flame?