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Philip Fedchin of Bard College Berlin Featured in Article About Universities in Exile

Bard College Berlin’s Philip Fedchin, manager of Smolny Beyond Borders Initiative and director of the Gagarin Center, was quoted in a Nature.com article about universities in exile. Fedchin had been a staff member at the Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in St Petersburg, Russia, the country’s first liberal arts college created in 1997 by Bard College in collaboration with St Petersburg State University. In 2021, the college was forced to close when Bard was the first institute of higher learning to be placed on a list of “undesirable organizations,” a designation declaring such organizations to be a national security threat as part of a larger strategy of intimidation by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government. “Everybody at the university in Smolny was shocked. It was considered the worst possible scenario, but it was just one of the few minor signs of what is going to come,” said Fedchin. Many Smolny faculty and students left the country when the invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022, and in November of the same year, Fedchin and his colleagues launched Smolny Beyond Borders. The university-in-exile initiative enables many former Smolny faculty members to teach courses online with a similar ethos to the original Smolny College. 

The aims of Smolny Beyond Borders have now expanded to supporting a broader community of students in exile from other parts of the world: the Global Higher Education Alliance for the 21st Century network (GHEA21), which provides opportunities for students to pursue learning, and the  Realizing Higher Education Access Program, a 12-month bridging programme intended to prepare refugee students for university. Additionally, the Bard Global Degree is a synchronous, online degree program for students displaced or threatened by conflict, crisis, or political repression and who have little or no access to a rigorous liberal arts education.
 

Post Date: 02-11-2026

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Leon Botstein Quoted in MassLive Article About Governmental Crackdowns on Education

Bard College President Leon Botstein was featured in an article by MassLive examining the similarities between Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s crackdown on higher education in Hungary and the actions of the Trump administration in the United States. The article looks at the example of the Central European University (CEU), an institution in the Bard Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, being forced to relocate from Budapest to Vienna and the ensuing resistance movement amongst Hungarian academics as a blueprint for actions to protect academia elsewhere. Botstein told MassLive that Orbán and Trump have been going after higher education in order to consolidate power and exert control over the process of developing and disseminating knowledge. “Viktor Orbán is an authoritarian and an opponent of democracy, and Donald Trump is an authoritarian who doesn’t respect either the Constitution or the rule of law and sees no boundary to prevent him from pursuing his own financial self-interest as well,” Botstein said.

Bard College’s Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) is a global network rethinking the humanities in the light of changing technologies, an increasingly connected planet, the ongoing ecological crisis, and the need to create more inclusive institutions. EHCN’s partner institutions include Universidad de los Andes, Birkbeck College at the University of London, Bard College Annandale, American University of Central Asia, Central European University, Bard College Berlin, Recovering Voices, Hampton University, Arizona State University, Al-Quds Bard College for Arts & Sciences, University of Thessaly, and European Humanities University. 

Post Date: 01-06-2026