ABSTRACT
Ukrainian higher education is found to be in the state of crisis by the local and international scholars and commentators. The persistence of the crisis suggests that higher education system may be caught in a transformational trap that combines unreflected assumptions about the past as well as unquestioned agreements with the proposed (Western) models of the future. This chapter engages elements of Ukrainian history characterised by oppression and violent exercise of power, with a particular emphasis on the events of Holodomor of 1933 and theories of trans-generational trauma transmission, to propose that current dysfunctions in the higher education sector may be mirroring the long forgotten events of 1933. We invite Ukrainian higher education leaders and Western leader developers to reconsider approaches to critical thinking in the context of trauma-informed understanding.
