USD Magazine Fall 2014

[ l e t t e r h o m e ] Dispatch to President Mary Lyons from Vi lnius, Li thuania CHANGEMAKING. PERSONIFIED.

The art of written correspondence lives on. Last February, USD President Mary E. Lyons, PhD, received a missive that epitomized the spirit of a true Changemaker: Dear Mary — I received the USD Magazine today and thought I’d drop you a line. The theme here is about circles within circles. My family is origi- nally from Minsk in Belarus. Though I had never been there, I promised myself I’d visit one day to get sense of my own history.

Since leaving my last presidency of Birmingham-Southern College, I have been content to do other work, but a number of months ago, I received a call from the CEO of the American Council for International Education. Life hasn’t been quite the same since. The European Humanities University (EHU) was founded in Minsk 21 years ago in response to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the need to educate the best young Belarusian minds to assume leadership roles in this

emerging, hopefully democratic, state. Lakashenko assumed power in 1994 and continues to align himself and his country with Putin in Russia. The university — being dedicated to democratic princi- ples and the development of civil societies — became a target. At Lakashenko’s behest, his secret police (Belarus’ version of the KGB) began doing their work and efforts were made to suppress the university and redirect its cur- riculum in line with the state’s old “Soviet” political position. The

founding rector, Anatoli Mikhailov, refused and was increasingly threatened, as were many of the faculty. About 11 years ago, they fled Belarus before it was too late and reestablished themselves in Lithuania’s capitol, Vilnius. Vilnius is a beautiful world heri- tage city that suffered severely under the Nazis and the Soviets. The Nazis, essentially decimating the Jewish population of the nation, murdered 70,000 Jews. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, after extraordinary displays

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