Thinking she would have free time, Yulia Komska, a professor of German studies at Dartmouth College who is from Ukraine, signed up to be a translator of Ukrainian news last week when the crisis began on Feb. 24.
Then, Russia invaded her home country.
Now, Komska is constantly communicating with graduate schools across the U.S., trying to find space and funding for graduate students in Ukraine trying to flee.
Several other Dartmouth professors are doing the same. And, with the situation changing hourly during the invasion, their personal and professional lives have been upended.
What began with a few professors in the German and Russian comparative literature departments — Komska, Ainsley Morse and Victoria Somoff — has grown to a much larger collaboration involving Dartmouth and other American colleges.
“What this initiative is about is trying to use the institution that we work for to the most effective extent possible,” said Morse, a professor of Russian literature who has friends and colleagues in Ukraine.
“It’s a fairly small-scale operation because we’re aware of the slowness and the bureaucracy and all of the other things that are just inherent to educational institutions … and we’re trying to do what we can in those within that framework,” she said.
Since the United States has not offered asylum to Ukrainians, immigration opportunities are limited. But graduate student programs — with their flexible admissions policies and visa-granting status — were the easiest place for the professors to start, they said.
While schools in Europe, especially former Soviet bloc countries, have already committed to taking in graduate students, “right now, everybody needs help … unless they’re already enrolled at a safe existing institution and can stay there,” said Komska, who has family members in Ukraine.
She said she expects Dartmouth’s Arts and Sciences school will offer five fully funded graduate student positions for Ukrainian students, and other Dartmouth sections may also offer spots. Departments across the school have been voting officially and unofficially to bring in students from Ukraine, she said.
As of now, Dartmouth will take “applications from students to programs in the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies for the spring and summer terms, past the normal deadline, when requested by program faculty,” Dartmouth spokesperson Diana Lawrence said.
The group is also sharing its methods with other universities and professors interested in bringing Ukrainian students to the United States.
After finding a list of institutions and the amount of aid they can offer, the Dartmouth professors plan to compile a list of students interested in applying to U.S. programs.
“There are preexisting institutions for displaced scholars,” Komska said. “Some of them grant full aid, some of them grant partial aid, aid to match whatever the university is contributing, and a lot of them deal with graduate and undergraduate students as well. … They could help universities place them, and we would just take, you know, whoever falls through the cracks” she said.
Morse said there is an established procedure for doing away with application deadlines when applicants hail from a place in crisis or when a full transcript is impossible to get. “We are relying on the precedent that exists,” Morse said.
Before the next academic year starts in September, Komska hopes the European Union’s recent decision to extend Ukrainians’ visas for three years will give future graduate students the ability to “try to wait it out in the EU now.”
The three Dartmouth professors are balancing this work while also trying to support current Ukrainian undergraduate students at Dartmouth and create a larger committee to tackle these issues.
The students — one of whom is currently in Ukraine — face financial difficulties paying tuition and fees for the semester, not to mention their anxieties and mental health struggles.
The professors have set up Ukrainian students at Dartmouth with their own office in the Russian department and have been “doing small humanitarian gestures, like care packages or food or homemade cookies,” Komska said.
Lawrence, the Dartmouth spokesperson, said the school has reached out to individual students “to offer support and resources, and have been referring them to the college chaplain, counseling, wellness center, housing support, financial aid services, and travel and visa assistance.”
