Emma Harden-Wolfson

Higher education in Central Asia blog

  • Today at CESS 2018: Roundtable on Central Asian Encounters with the European Higher Education Area

    If you should find yourself in Pittsburgh, PA, today – October 27, 2018 – please join us at the Central Eurasian Studies Society’s 2018 Annual Conference for our roundable on Global Bolognaization: Central Asian Encounters with the European Higher Education Area. Followers of my blog may remember the call for proposals that co-convenor Aliya Akatayeva… Read more

  • Nazarbayev University Number 2?

    No stranger to creating new universities, Kazakhstan’s longstanding (and thus far only) president Nursultan Nazarbayev has already set up or led initiatives since founding KIMEP University in 1992. Now, building on the investment and early successes of the eponymous Nazarbayev University – which the president apparently did not ask to be named after himself –… Read more

  • Resit required: Uzbekistan university rankings declared invalid

    Just weeks after the release of Uzbekistan’s first national university rankings, it has emerged that the country’s Ministry of Justice has demanded the rankings be annulled. This is almost unheard of: one state department publicly admonishing another. The Ministry of Justice must have serious concerns to go public with its beef against the Ministry of… Read more

  • New(ish) publication: The politics of the great brain race

    I realized I didn’t blog about a recently published article I co-authored with Prof Creso Sá, my supervisor at the University of Toronto. How remiss of me! (?!) So, let me tell you about our article, The politics of the great brain race: Public policy and international student recruitment in Australia, Canada, England and the USA,… Read more

  • Higher education reforms in Uzbekistan

    In an interview with Gazeta.uz [ru] published on 18 September, Uzbek Deputy Prime Minister Aziz Abdukhakimov offers some insights into higher education reforms in the country. The list is impressively long, indicative of broader reform trends taking place across government and in society as a whole. In higher education, I’ve already flagged Uzbekistan’s growing interest in… Read more

  • New publication: Emerging global players: Building institutional legitimacy in universities in Estonia and Kazakhstan

    Summer 2018 is turning out to be a productive time for book publishing: in July, a chapter I wrote with Professor Creso Sá on scientific nationalism and scientific globalism was published; late August saw the publication of my new chapter with Dr Merli Tamtik called: Emerging global players: Building institutional legitimacy in universities in Estonia… Read more