Soviet Legacy and Colonial Mentality: Continuity and Change in Ukraine’s Higher Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the forces that impeded university reform in Ukraine prior to the Russian invasion in 2014 and the onset of the full-scale war in 2022. Ukraine’s post-Soviet educational system, which was originally designed to reproduce the subservience, compliance, and rigidity of the Russian and Soviet empires, preserved administrative mechanisms and entitlements that curbed institutional transformation. Russia’s invasion, however, spurred universities in Ukraine to make a radical move away from the Russian/Soviet template of higher education. This paper contextualizes the contentious history of Russo-Ukrainian relations within a discussion of the constraints spawned by the Soviet legacy and colonial mindset in Ukrainian universities. An analysis of the challenges to transformation is followed by policy recommendations for reformers and intellectual leaders seeking to decolonize their academic communities through the internationalization of higher education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".