Serhiy Kvit is perhaps Ukraine’s most successful minister, but he became a politician only by chance. Almost two years ago, Kvit was rector of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He agreed to visit student protesters barricaded inside Ukraine’s education ministry during the country’s ‘Maidan revolution’, which led to the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014.

“Students asked us to present our vision of higher education and research, and they approved of our concept,” Kvit told Times Higher Education on a visit to London in December. Within a few days, the 48-year-old had been appointed education and science minister and was then asked to stay on after elections in October 2014. Last year, Kvit was named Ukraine’s most successful minister by the magazine Vlast Deneg in recognition of his achievement in pushing through more than half his reform programme in under two years.

One highlight was the passing of Ukraine’s first higher education law since 2002 to sweep away the top-down Soviet model of university management by giving students and staff more say in campus affairs. Other initiatives underway include efforts to improve university quality assurance, a crackdown on plagiarism and academic fraud and reform of the country’s vocational education system. A new law on research funding, which was approved in December, will give universities more independence and financial autonomy, Kvit says.

The research law also requires Ukraine’s national research centres, which receive more than 90 percent of the country’s research funds, to work more closely with universities. This restructuring aims to raise the standard of research in a sector dominated by Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, which, Kvit believes, has become something of a law unto itself. That the academy is run by a 97-year-old scientist, Borys Paton, who has been president since 1962 clearly bothers Kvit, who is keen for the organisation to “produce more science that Ukraine needs”.

For higher education to prosper, the dominance of individuals within Ukraine’s academy, and indeed its wider political landscape, must be reduced, argues Kvit. “The old Soviet model was about a charismatic leader from whom all ideas and laws will flow and everyone will follow him. Now we need a new post-Soviet model of leadership, in which teams in universities play a larger part and different levels of management involve many more people in decisions.”

(Excerpted and adapted from )