What It’s Like To Run A B-School In A War Zone

Tymofiy Mylovanov: “I suspected that something might happen and I came back to Ukraine two days before the invasion”

Kyiv School of Economics was founded in 2006, spun off as an independent school from a two-year master’s degree program in economics at the National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine. That program had been established 10 years earlier by the Eurasia Foundation and a consortium of organizations including Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ford Foundation, and the World Bank, with a mandate to strengthen economics education in countries of the former Soviet Union.

KSE is now widely considered the premier graduate school of economics and management in Ukraine. It offers three master’s degree programs in economics jointly with the University of Houston, as well as a 20-month MBA for Future CEOs and a 21-month MBA for State-Owned Enterprises, taught in English by professors who earned Ph.D.s from European Union and U.S. universities; KSE also has two bachelor’s degree and multiple executive and professionalization programs. In all, the school currently has around 400 (mostly graduate) students — a small school, but with an outsize impact: More than 100 KSE graduates have gone on to earn their own Ph.D.s at Western universities.

In addition to being a former government minister, Tymofiy Mylovanov is a tenured associate professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his master’s in economics from KSE in 1999 and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004. He has taught at the University of Bonn, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Pennsylvania, and his research — on game theory, contract theory, and institutional design — has been widely published internationally. Since 2016 he has served as deputy chairman of the Council of the National Bank of Ukraine.

RUNNING A BUSINESS SCHOOL IN A WAR ZONE

Mylovanov became KSE’s president after leaving Ukraine’s government in 2020. A frequent lecturer at U.S. universities, he was there when the drumbeat of war became too loud to ignore in February.

On February 22, he returned to Kyiv; two days later, Russia invaded.

“I suspected that something might happen and I came back to Ukraine two days before the invasion,” Mylovanov tells P&Q. “I just canceled my engagements in San Francisco. I was giving some talks and doing this and that. I’m also faculty at the University of Pittsburgh.

“I was traveling around the U.S. in Chicago, Harvard, and New York, working from Stanford, trying to talk about Ukraine. But then I’m also advising the president’s office, because I was a minister. So I exchanged some messages with Zelenskyy a couple of days before just to give him support. I talked to ministers and prime ministers and other people, so I kind of had the feeling that we’re going to have war. And I wrote a little post and I had a couple of things: what a company should do, what universities should do if there is a war, that everyone should have protocols. President really got upset at me. He said, ‘It’s not going to be, you are just exaggerating, you’re creating panic,’ but maybe it was his strategy.”

With protocols in place for wartime, KSE was ready. Now that war has begun, the school must — and will — adapt, Mylovanov says.

“Half of our guys are fighting and half of our guys are running businesses. So they cannot really take classes, executive classes right now,” he says. “We’re here probably in for the long haul — it’s going to be months, if not years. And so we’ll have to be training students, but it’s going to be a different type of demand. We will need lectures on wartime leadership. The economy is adjusting, and that’s another thing. We’re evolving.”

HORROR STORIES

The school is “operational,” Mylovanov says, but studies have not yet resumed. Currently, he and the rest of the KSE leadership team are busy keeping close track of their nearly 400 students, with frequent “checkups.” It’s a huge part of his day, working the phones from his home.

“We are a relatively small school. Our enrollment right now is 400 students,” he says. “It’s mostly graduate students, but some undergraduates. We just started a bachelor’s program. Our plan was to grow to 5,000 students in the next five, seven years. But it was just first intake. So we basically have 300 graduate students and then a hundred bachelor. And we’re doing checkups, right? So the deans or coordinators of programs — depending on who it is, because some people are mobilized, some people are working with government, some people are working with military — we have checkups. And if someone doesn’t show up for a checkup, let’s say three times, that means 24 hours, one checkup and the next morning checkup, then we get worried. But sometimes to get from place to place, even if it’s a hundred miles, it could take two days.

“All of the vice presidents, that’s the management team of the school, from CFO to deans, they’re responsible for their staff and they’re responsible for students. They delegate down as needed, the chain of command. And we are doing checkups with students every two, four days. All students, as of today, as of last checkup, are accounted for.”

That wasn’t the case when the war began, he says.

“We had eight unaccounted for in the beginning of the war, then four. And then until 24 hours ago, it was two. And they got out of these northwest areas of Kyiv.”

They got out, Mylovanov says, but they had close calls.

“And they’re telling horror stories, absolute horror stories. We had an undergraduate student, Russians troops, regular troops, put her in the basement with her family and several other families in that village and kept them for two weeks there. That’s why we didn’t have any contact. And they wouldn’t give them even water for two weeks. They didn’t have water. I don’t know, they crawled out. I don’t know how they survived. It’s the worst I’ve heard. You know? It’s worse than just shooting. They’re keeping them and people are dying. I don’t know how but she survived.

“And we had two students like that in the same areas and they came in contact yesterday. So in many ways we are relieved, but the stories we’ve heard from them … ”

He pauses, his voice breaking.

“It’s just a kid, a young girl. You know what they have to do there to survive, if you start thinking about it, you know? What kind of things they do there, they become animals to survive.

“I thought things like that could only be happening in the 1940s, 1930s when there was the Holocaust. But no, they happen now.”

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