I have a viscerally negative reaction to weak, mumbly men with no initiative. I grew up around young men who were like that, and even now I’m still not over it. I shared before how shocked and confused I was when I became a college student in Canada at the age of 22 and discovered that male students actually spoke in class. Back home, male students would invariably sit in the back of the classroom, giggle, blush, and most certainly never express anything that could pass for an opinion.
Of course, there were enterprising, decisive young men in the post-Soviet Ukraine of the 1990s. They were bandits. I was not hanging out with them. I spent time around normal boys, college students, computer programmers. And they all had zero-initiative, weak and pliable personalities.
Apparently, though, things changed completely in Ukraine.
Last week, our new Ukrainian Fulbrighter came, and this time it’s a guy. He is very young because he wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country if he were over the age of, I believe, 23. He was very excited about teaching his Beginner Ukrainian course, but when he went into the classroom on Tuesday, it was empty. I looked into it, and there had been an unfortunate bureaucratic glitch that resulted in the students being dropped from the course. I was, of course, very unhappy about this.
“Don’t worry about this,” the Ukrainian Fulbrighter said. “I’ll handle it. I’ll find students.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “The semester started. Everybody’s schedule is complete.”
At the initiative of our neoliberal administrator, the practice of students wandering around for a couple of weeks sampling courses and deciding which one to take has been destroyed. Once classes start, everybody is locked into their schedule, and breaching that requires loads of unpleasant paperwork.
“Seriously, it’s ok”, said the Ukrainian guy. “I’ll take care of it.”
I’m not used to people who work for me in academia telling me that they will take care of anything, so I was puzzled.
But guess what? The Ukrainian guy found a big student event going on somewhere on campus, created flyers, somehow found the place to print them in color for free (a feat that I would not be able to accomplish even after 17 years on this campus), and convinced the organizers of the event to give him a table. He decorated the table and started recruiting students.
Long story short, Beginner Ukrainian 1 now has students. I have professors teaching courses with only two or three students, provoking deep ire of the administration, coupled with threats to close down their entire programs. And they haven’t figured out how to do what this boy has done.
Of course, if this were a 20-year-old American guy, this wouldn’t be surprising. The situation is blowing my mind because this is a Ukrainian son of two college professors who, in my generation, would not be capable of any of this.
Something happened in the 28 years that I spent away from the country, and a completely new type of young people came into existence. My sister now hires a lot of Ukrainians and works with Ukrainian business partners, and she confirms that this is not an exceptional case. These are very different Ukrainians from our generation. This would be a great area of research for sociologists. Was it capitalism? Nationalism? What created this transformation?
People will say, “N is not like that, so why are you so surprised?” But N left. He wasn’t like that and he left because he wasn’t like that. I wasn’t like the Ukrainian girls of my generation, and I also left to be with people who are like me.
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