Bard College Acting President Jonathan Becker Delivered 2026 Commencement Address at Kyiv School of Economics

KYIV, UKRAINE—On August 1, 2026, Jonathan Becker, acting president of Bard College, delivered the commencement address at Kyiv School of Economics (KSE)’s graduation ceremony, at KSE Obolon in Kyiv. Diplomas were conferred on 249 students across the departments of Economics, School of Engineering, Social Sciences, Computer Science, and the KSE Graduate Business School. The ceremony took place as KSE marks the 30th anniversary of its founding.

“It was a great honor to welcome Bard College Acting President Jonathan Becker as our commencement speaker—the first international commencement speaker in KSE’s history to address our undergraduate students,” said Tymofii Brik, the rector of KSE. “He was an ideal choice, sharing five lessons on leadership, responsibility, and civic agency drawn from his own experience. Bard College is renowned for its pedagogy, global impact, and leadership in civic engagement—qualities central to KSE’s own mission. Bard and KSE are connected through both direct collaborations, including a summer school on reading and learning in Kyiv, and shared partnerships, such as with Olin College of Engineering, with which Bard also collaborates through its partnership with Fulbright University Vietnam. That President Becker traveled to Kyiv in person to deliver this address, despite the ongoing threat of Russian missile strikes, stands as a powerful testament to his commitment to education and to democracy.”

The KSE programs of social psychology, unmanned aerial vehicles, and micro and nano electronics, graduated their first cohorts this year. Becker also highlighted Delta Engineering, KSE’s new engineering program named after the call sign of Daria Lopatina, an undergraduate computer science student who volunteered for military service and was killed in action. “We recognize that today is a day of joy for those graduating, but of sadness as we think of those lost, like Daria, over the recent years,” Becker said in his address.

The graduation took place at the end of a week of large-scale Russian strikes on the capital. Overnight on July 30, explosions hit Kyiv’s districts as part of an attack in which Ukraine’s air force reported 74 missiles and 284 drones launched across the country. Graduates, families, and faculty gathered the following morning.

“During the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, international partnerships matter more than ever. Since 2022, the partnership between KSE and Bard College has proven to be strong and strategic,” said Kostyantyn Kyrychenko, Vice Rector for International Cooperation at KSE. “KSE has been an active member of GHEA21, the Global Higher Education Alliance for the 21st Century, previously known as the Open Society University Network, led by Bard College. That makes having Dr. Becker as our first international commencement speaker ever even more special. Our mission at KSE is to preserve and foster young talents for future rebuilding and development of Ukraine. Thus, it has been a great pleasure to work with Dr. Becker and the Bard team on the summer school Language & Thinking Kyiv for 35 Ukrainian high schoolers from all over Ukraine, including frontline and rural communities. Both KSE and Bard recognize that higher education starts long before applying to universities, and it is important for both of our institutions to support local talent and invest in the young people even before welcoming them on our campuses.”

Becker delivered his address at a time when KSE and Bard College are expanding their academic collaborative efforts in Ukraine. Earlier that week, Becker attended the opening of Language & Thinking Kyiv (L&T Kyiv), a three-week tuition-free summer program launched by Bard College in partnership with KSE and the Ukrainian Leadership Academy. L&T is Bard’s signature program that involves deep engagement with texts and an exploration of the iterative process between writing and thought. It is a core part of the curriculum at Bard College campuses across the United States and the globe and has been at the heart of Bard’s promotion of liberal arts and sciences education. The L&T Kyiv program, founded by Bard undergraduate Yana Lahoda ’27, is funded by Nova Ukraine with additional support from Ukraine Global Scholars. In addition to Bard’s programmatic partnerships in Ukraine, in 2025-2026, 29 Ukrainian students were enrolled at Bard.

“It was incredibly meaningful to me to, after thirty years, come back to Ukraine at this challenging time and meet bright, motivated students who, despite a myriad of challenges, want to shape their country’s future,” said Jonathan Becker. “I am thankful to the Kyiv School of Economics for their partnership and for giving me the opportunity to speak in solidarity with these extraordinary young people.”

Becker first came to Ukraine in 1992, at 27, as part of the first cohort of lecturers sent by the Civic Education Project (CEP). He taught politics at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, four years before KSE was founded there, and later became CEP's Ukraine country director, overseeing lecturers who taught students from Lviv to Donetsk. In his commencement address, Becker noted what has changed in the 34 years since then, and emphasized the notion of engaged citizenship as a countermeasure against authoritarianism and the importance of an education that teaches one not what to think, but how to think.

Asta Motrenko, KSE 2026 graduate in Business Economics, said, “The core takeaway for me was the importance of staying true to your idea, no matter the obstacles, and pursuing your goal relentlessly. This is especially vital for us Ukrainian youth right now, to raise our voice and carry our message through to the end. Thank you, KSE, for cultivating such professionals and inspiring leaders.”


Text of Commencement address by Jonathan Becker

My relationship with Ukraine began in early 1992. I was 27 and living in New Haven, Connecticut, teaching at Yale University, when my then girlfriend came up to me with a flyer about a program called the Civic Education Project, also known as CEP. CEP offered opportunities for American and European academics to volunteer to teach at universities in Central and Eastern Europe. Ukraine had just become independent again and, in the fall of 1992, I became part of the first cohort of CEP lecturers to come and teach. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the decision to come to Ukraine did not portend great things for my relationship, but the Ukraine experience shaped the next 30+ years of my career.
 
I taught politics at Kyiv Mohyla Academy, which was in its first year of operation since 1819. (Kyiv School of Economics, which is marking its 30^th anniversary, would only be founded four years later.) My classes focused on rights, rule of law, and democracy. Through a series of unanticipated events, I soon moved from being a simple visiting lecturer to CEP’s Ukraine country director, overseeing ten lecturers who taught hundreds of students across the country, from Lviv to Donetsk. I’m grateful to this country for launching my career as an administrator who works at the intersection of higher education and civic life.
 
Coming back to Ukraine this week, 34 years later has offered me a chance to think about how I’ve changed and how much the world has changed, and to think about the lessons that I have learned since the time I landed in Boryspil Airport in the fall of 1992.
 
I’d like to share some of those lessons here with you.
 
Lesson one: the difference between success and failure can be small details.

In 1992, soon after I arrived in Kyiv, I learned this first and difficult lesson. One of the most formidable people at the university in those days was the person I will call the “key lady.” The key lady was, as far as I could tell, far more powerful than the president or rector. She sat in a small office in which, on a wall, were keys to all classrooms dangling on hooks. And if you want to know what power looks like, that was power: the key lady could unilaterally decide where you would teach, when you would teach, and even in some cases if you would teach, because without a key nothing would proceed. And she exercised that power in robust but not always predictable ways.           
 
I teach classes on civic engagement and one of the things we teach is power-mapping. And this woman was an apex power. So, when I was asked to give a talk at Kyiv Mohyla about potential reforms to higher education in Ukraine, my first idea was not about the curriculum or teaching methods, or what people should read. Instead, it was the radical idea: open classrooms at the beginning of the day and close them at the end of the day. The simple point is this: pay attention to details because it is often the little things that determine if the big things work.
 
Lesson two: recognize the power you have, and be generous when you have it.

My most important professional moment happened a bit more than a year after I left Ukraine, when I was the European Director of CEP, based in Prague. The program had grown immensely to more than 120 lecturers in a dozen countries. I was at events associated with the annual board meeting of the Open Society Institute, which was deciding about funding for the program. I was important, but not important enough to be invited to the board meeting itself.      So I went and waited outside and informed the note taker that I was available if anyone had any questions.
 
Much to my surprise, not only was I ushered in, I was seated next to George Soros the chairman of the Open Society Institute, whom I knew of but had never met. He informed me that the Board had decided to defund CEP. Since CEP received 98% of its funding from the Open Society Institute, it meant the program’s end. I was flabbergasted. All I could think of was my amazing students back in Ukraine whom I had taught and the many fellow lecturers who were committed to educating young people. We had come to the region not to get rich (we were paid $250 per month plus the lowest local professor’s salary which was at one point a whopping 8 dollars a month); instead, we came with a sense of purpose and idealism that existed amongst so many after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union.
 
So there I was in that room in Budapest, told my program was being eliminated. I am not sure what was expected of me, but the one thing I decided was that I was going to speak up for the literally thousands of students and faculty whom I knew had benefitted so much from this program.
 
First, I sputtered, and then proceeded with increasing fervor to make my case forcefully with the board members who were seated around tables in a rectangle. I expressed indignation at how they misunderstood and misrepresented the program, and invoked my experience working with amazing young students in Ukraine.
 
But this story is not about me, it is about George Soros and how leaders conduct themselves. Now somewhere along the way George Soros has become a target who is frequently vilified. This is usually done by political leaders who have failed at something and want to distract people by finding someone else to blame. I know George Soros best from what happened in that room in Budapest more than 30 years ago. After 15 minutes of me arguing with board members, he ended the conversation. Instead of doing what most leaders in his position would have done, which is to accept group-think and affirm the decision of the eminent board members, he listened and did something most of us rarely do: he changed his mind. Instead of sending me and the program packing, he restored funding. He invited me to develop the next stage of the program, which was to create a pathway for Ukrainian academics and other academics from the region who studied in the US and Europe to come back to their home countries and teach. And he gave me his phone number and said if I ever had a problem to call.
 
What is the lesson here? Good leadership, a thoughtful exercise of authority, is best done in a considered manner and is not just about accepting conventional wisdom and responding to the best known and most “experienced” people in the room.
 
Lesson Three: There are lessons from history, but it is important to choose the right lesson.

Last month on July 4^th, the United States celebrated the 250^th year since its Declaration of Independence.
 
When I came to Ukraine as a 27 year old in 1992, the lesson I thought I was teaching to Ukrainians, in my youthful exuberance and arrogance, was rooted in the first sentence of the Declaration, which reads: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
           
Now, nearly three and a half decades later, the lessons I draw are in a different part of the Declaration. Today, you, Ukrainians are the teachers, and my fellow Americans and I are the students. The penultimate sentence of the Declaration, which is rarely cited, reads:
 
“[T]hese United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; … all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and… as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”
 
Today, Ukraine is at the forefront of the battle for freedom. Unlike the President and Vice President of my country, who sat in the Oval Office in February 2025 and berated the Ukrainian leader during Ukraine’s fight to remain independent for not being sufficiently “thankful” to the United States, I and my fellow Americans should be grateful to Ukraine. You remind us 250 years later of the most essential lessons of the Declaration of Independence, that without independence, that without sovereignty, and that with imperial subjugation, there cannot be freedom.
 
Lesson four: democracy is a verb.

When I was teaching in Ukraine, I asked my students a question: What does it take for a country to become a democracy? Here, I often discussed with my students the criteria by which a country’s system of governance could cross some imaginary threshold to be considered a democracy (or, conversely, if it has backslid from democracy into authoritarianism). This question had great resonance in the mid 1990s.
 
Now, years later, I take a different approach. As I have spent increasing time of my career creating opportunities for young people to become more civically engaged, I have emphasized instead a statement coined by my former congressman, Abner Mikva, which is “Democracy is a verb.” When I say democracy is a verb, I am referring to of how people can individually and collectively contribute to their community and to the common good whatever the socio-political environment in which they are situated. In this context it is important to note that civic engagement is the enemy of authoritarians who want to isolate and atomize you. In the words of political scientist Robert Putnam, civic engagement helps transform the “I” into the “We.”
 
I say this today because I put my faith in young people. You have a greater stake in the future because you are the future. Even in a time of crisis, especially in a time of crisis, including war, you can have tremendous influence. I have seen repeatedly in my career the ways in which young people can be agents of change and make a dramatic difference in whatever communities they engage with, locally, nationally, and globally. I have tried to emphasize that you are not simply passive objects shaped by history and outside forces, but that you have agency: you and your generation are authors of your own history, you are authors of the future of Ukraine, and that future is not written.
 
This past week I have spent time with 35 Ukrainian high school students who are participating in a program that Bard College runs across the globe that is called Language and Thinking, which we are doing here in cooperation with KSE. The course focuses on the careful reading of texts and the iterative process between writing and thought. It seeks to achieve many things, but most importantly it is about young people finding their voice, the courage to express their perspectives, which is essential if they are to exercise agency.
 
The program itself is an exercise in agency by a Bard student, Yana Lahoda, who is from Ukraine and who is with us today. Yana has spent this entire last school year devoted to building this program, and she has bigger goals for the future—she wants to build a version of a Bard Early College in Ukraine because she sees rigorous education as an important pathway to a strong, democratic, and just Ukraine. Even from 7,500 kilometers away, Yana was committed to impacting her homeland. She was and remains committed to living democracy as a verb.
 
Lesson Five: Education and critical thinking should not end when you graduate.

I understand that you are excited about getting your diplomas, and certainly it is an extraordinary achievement. But the diplomas do not make you, the education does.
 
Education is not memorizing things you learned in class. Education is not simply your area of specialization. A good education, like the one you have received at KSE, teaches you how to think—not simply what to think. It imbues you with skills that will last a lifetime: the capacity to read, to write, to analyze, and to think critically and creatively about issues that confront you. Most of all it teaches you to ask meaningful questions, to imagine a world better than the one in which you live, and it gives you the tools you need to work towards that world.
 
There is also something important here for higher education in Ukraine. I want to say that you have also been exposed to what my colleague, Jelani Favors, calls the “second curriculum,” which in the United States refers to the role that Historically Black Colleges and Universities played in the fight against segregation and subjugation of African Americans. Here in Kyiv, whatever your subject, you have also been exposed to a cultural and national consciousness that envisions a future of an independent and democratic Ukraine, and you have been offered the tools to be social, political, and economic agents of change.

There are antecedents to this in the country in the academic and intellectual sphere, be it the Shistdesiatnyky (the non-conformist poets and writers of the late 1950s and 60s who rejected socialist realism) or academics going back to Mykhailo Hrushevsky. But the real measure of an academic institution is not who the teachers are, but rather what their pupils do. And, just like graduates of Historically Black Colleges and Universities who advanced American democracy and shaped much of modern America through the battle for civil rights, you will further distinguish KSE by shaping your country’s history and its future in tremendously important ways.

And this leads not to a lesson but to a recommendation: I urge you to maintain a sense of idealism like I had when I came to Ukraine, and which Yana has demonstrated this year, even at a time when it is easier to be disengaged, discouraged or cynical.
 
It is easy to dismiss idealism as naivete. I beg to differ.
 
As Cody Keenan, an advisor to former US President Barack Obama, said: “Idealism is not the simplistic belief that things will get better. It's the belief that, with effort, things can get better. It’s understanding the world as it is, and fighting for the world as it should be anyway. And there is joy to be found in that struggle.”     
 
Please find the joy of being part of community, of being the “We,” of being engaged citizens—the joy of imagining a better future for all of us.
 
I congratulate you all.
I wish you all well.
Slava Ukraini.

This event was last updated on 08-04-2026

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