b. 1947
Viacheslav Briukhovetskyi
Reviver of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
He wrote Order No. 1 of the revived Kyiv-Mohyla Academy himself: “I am starting work as rector.” In 1991 the literary scholar Viacheslav Briukhovetskyi led the revival of the Mohyla Academy and built it into a modern university on the North American model.
Key accomplishments
- Initiator of the revival of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (1991) and its “founding father”
- Rector (from 1991) and first elected president (1994–2007) of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy; honorary president since 2007
- Books on criticism (The Force Field of Criticism, 1984) and the monographs Lina Kostenko and Mykola Zerov (both 1990)
- Hero of Ukraine (2007); Order of Merit, 3rd class (1997)
“I am starting work as rector”
That was Order No. 1 of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, dated 15 November 1991, and Viacheslav Briukhovetskyi wrote it himself. “Before the academy I had no experience at all of working in higher education,” he recalled in an interview. At the time he was a literary scholar.
Briukhovetskyi was born in 1947 in Vladikavkaz, where his parents had moved from Ukraine after the war. When he was two weeks old, the family returned and settled in Cherkasy. In 1974 he graduated from Kyiv University, worked at the newspaper Literaturna Ukraina and, from 1980, at the Institute of Literature, where he headed the department of literary theory. He studied literary criticism, which he saw as lying on the border of literature, scholarship and journalism, and wrote books on Lina Kostenko and Mykola Zerov (both 1990). He taught at the University of Manitoba (Canada) and Rutgers University (USA).
The new “Mohyla”
In 1991, by an ordinance of the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s parliament), the historical Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was re-established on its historical grounds as an independent university. Briukhovetskyi, who had initiated the revival, became its organizing rector; the university officially opened in August 1992. In 1994 it was given national status, and Briukhovetskyi became its first elected president, leading it until 2007.
The university was built on the North American model: students were admitted through rigorous entrance tests, teaching was in Ukrainian and English, and it was the first in Ukraine to introduce a four-year bachelor’s degree (1992), a 100-point grading scale and a two-year master’s degree (1996). In 2007 Briukhovetskyi was made a Hero of Ukraine; as of October 2026 he is honorary president of the university.
Why it matters today
The Encyclopedia of Ukraine says the Mohyla Academy is generally considered the least corrupt of the country’s classical universities, and Briukhovetskyi its “founding father”. Rankings consistently place it among the best universities in Ukraine, especially in the humanities, social sciences and computer science.
