STU and the Ultimate “Trust” Exercise
The main administrative building of STU – the State Tax University in Irpin, Ukraine — is a burned-out shell. Since Russia’s unprovoked invasion in February 2022, it has remained a ravaged reminder that invasion forces reached as far as this pleasant town on the outskirts of Kyiv before finding themselves halted and turned back by Ukrainian forces. Almost four years later, Irpin looks mostly like itself again, but not at STU, where student announcements on inaccessible bulletin boards still flutter in the breeze, and a gaping hole in the floor of the building’s basketball court indicates the direct hit of an artillery shell, which miraculously failed to detonate among those sheltering below it back in 2022.
Visiting the STU campus on behalf of Build Forward Ukraine, it is hard not to be moved by what is, truly, a crime scene. Still, it is not unique, echoing many locations around Ukraine today - schools, churches, apartment buildings — all with their own stories of tragedy, survival, adaptation, and resilience. So why come here to Irpin, all the way from California, and why replace this shattered 1950s-era university building with something completely different? The answer in the end is the potential to build resilience – physical, societal, educational, economic – for the short term, and the long term.
Build Forward Ukraine started as a California-based alliance of technical experts and educators committed to Ukraine, developing a partnership with the STU Rector (who serves in his local anti-drone defense unit in his spare time), launching a global design competition to select a world-class solution (Stantec) with input from Ukrainian architects, and establishing educational partnerships between Stanford University and Ukrainian architectural/design students. Initial work centered on building back better — producing, with Ukrainian partners, a world-class university building meeting international standards for energy efficiency, transparency, and safety. Today our perspective and ambitions go far beyond physical reconstruction — to making the university itself a center of excellence and guiding example for the principles of efficiency, transparency, trust, and accountability in Ukrainian institutions.
Why STU? Because the university itself is key to replicating these principles across the country. During the fall, Ukrainian Anti-Corruption agencies established in recent years have held government institutions and leaders accountable for misuse of public funds, illustrating not only their own effectiveness, but the continued importance of overcoming the legacy of corruption still plaguing post-Soviet nations. STU plays its own role in this fragile ecosystem of accountability and trust-building — training and educating the next generation of Ukrainian tax officials to carry out the ultimate trust exercise — collecting revenue from the public to pay for investments, institutions, and services, while identifying and investigating any attempts to avoid transparency and accountability. STU’s Center for Economic Security is a great example of this work— building expertise and mainstreaming best practices directly from anti-corruption investigators to students. The reconstruction of the university administration building will be another — by integrating the narrative of the building’s construction process into the curriculum itself as a multi-faceted example of best practices and transparent project management.
Having lived in or worked with Ukraine myself over most of the last five years, I am constantly in awe of their resilience during constant attacks on both military and civilian targets. When the shooting does stop, a new kind of resilience will be needed however, built on the promise of a brighter future, and a dedication to make good on promises of reform, reconstruction, and good governance. After visiting STU in Irpin I realised there was no better place to start this work than here, where Ukrainians turned despair into hope and disaster into resilience.