Zaporizhia National University

Zaporizhia National University (Запорізький національний університет; Zaporizkyi natsionalnyi universytet). An institution of higher learning in Zaporizhia. It was established as a university in 1984 on the basis of the Zaporizhia Pedagogical Institute (ZPI), founded in 1930 as the Institute of Social Education and reorganized in 1933 into a pedagogical institute tasked with training teachers. Initially ZPI consisted of only two faculties: social-economic (with the department of history and economics; and the department of literature and language) and engineering and mathematics (with two departments: physics and mathematics). On the eve of the Second World War the institute had four faculties (history; language and literature; physics and mathematics; and natural sciences) and more than 4,000 students. During the war, between 1941 and 1943, the institute was evacuated in the town of Leninabad (today Khujand), Tajikistan, in Central Asia. The institute’s buildings in Zaporizhia were largely destroyed during the war.

In the 1940s and 1950s the institute trained students in the fields of philology, physics, mathematics, chemistry, and biology. In the 1960s few more fields of study were added, among them music, foreign languages, and physical education. In the early 1970s the faculty of history was opened. To meet the growing needs of a large industrial region, in 1984 the institute was reorganized into the Zaporizhia University. During its first decade, the university trained 8,112 specialists. The faculty of biology was added in 1987, followed by the division of the faculty of physics and mathematics into two separate faculties in 1990. The 1990s saw the opening of several new faculties: economics and law (later two separate faculties) in 1991; the faculty of social pedagogy and psychology in 1992; and the faculty of management and pre-college training in 1995. In the mid 1990s its enrollment reached 5,064 full-time and 2,395 part-time students. Prominent mathematician Viacheslav Tolok was the university’s founding rector (in 1985–2003). In 2004 it was granted a national university status and assumed its present name, the Zaporizhia National University (ZNU).

As of 2021 ZNU has 12 faculties: mathematics; history; sociology and management; foreign languages; philology; biology; economics; physical education, health, and tourism; law; social pedagogy and psychology; management; and journalism. There is also the Engineering Institute and teaching units located in other cities: Kryvyi Rih and Melitopol (the faculty of the humanities and economics). In addition, ZNU operates several colleges, centers, and administrative departments. The current student enrollment is 14,000. ZNU scholarly library includes 1,200,000 printed and electronic titles and is among the best academic libraries of Ukraine.

ZNU has been consistently ranked among Ukraine’s best colleges and universities. In 2020 it was ranked 37 among 240 colleges and universities in the Consolidated Ranking of Ukraine’s colleges and universities conducted by the educational web portal Osvita.ua. It was also ranked 22 in Top 200 Ukraine, an independent academic ranking. ZNU has published several scholarly periodicals, most notably, Visnyk Zaporiz'koho natsional'noho universytetu (since 1998, in several series). Other ZNU periodicals include Pytannia bioindykatsiї ta ekolohiї (24 nos, 2008–19), Naukovi pratsi istorychnoho fakul'tetu (54 nos, 1993–2020), Nova filolohiia (70 nos, 2000–20), and Iurydychnyi naukovyi elektronnyi zhurnal (43 nos, 2013–20).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Orlianskii, S., Tkachenko, V. Materialy k istorii Zaporozhskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, vol 1 (Zaporizhia 1998)
ZNU official website: https://www.znu.edu.ua/

Serhiy Bilenky

[This article was updated in 2021.]