By Gina Christian
Catholic News Service
PHILADELPHIA — A local Catholic college founded by Ukrainian women religious has teamed up with 15 other schools to confer honorary doctorates on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Manor College in Jenkintown north of Philadelphia announced April 1 it will award an honorary doctor of humane letters degree to Zelenskyy, the first such degree for the school since its establishment in 1947 by the Sisters of the Order of St. Basil the Great.
Iryna Mazur, honorary consul of Ukraine in Philadelphia, will accept the degree at Manor’s May 12 commencement ceremony on behalf of Zelenskyy, whose leadership has garnered international acclaim since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine Feb. 24.
Fifteen other U.S. colleges and universities have joined Manor in granting Zelenskyy honorary degrees: Alvernia University and Chatham University, both in Pennsylvania; Alfred University, Bard College, Canisius College, Hilbert College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Keuka College, Le Moyne College, Rochester Institute of Technology and Utica University, all in New York state; Adrian College in Michigan; Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina; and Shenandoah University and Virginia Wesleyan University, both in Virginia.
According to an April 1 statement from Manor College, the schools’ collective decision to award the degrees “appears to be a globally unprecedented move” — one fitting for a head of state who has defied expectations.
Born in 1978, Zelenskyy initially forged a successful career in film and television, producing 10 feature-length movies and winning dozens of awards while earning a degree in law from Kyiv National Economic University in Ukraine.
He foreshadowed his political career with a starring role in the 2015-2019 Ukrainian television series “Servant of the People” (“Sluga Naroda”), a satire in which a frustrated high school teacher is elected president after his rant against government corruption becomes a social media sensation.
Elected in 2019, Zelenskyy has sought to advance his nation’s growth as a democracy, despite ongoing Russian opposition since Ukraine gained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991.
In 2014, Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, with Russian-backed separatists proclaiming “people’s republics” in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Over the next eight years, clashes, shelling and sniper attacks became common in eastern Ukraine, resulting in an estimated 14,000 to 15,000 deaths and about 1.5 million internally displaced persons.