Emma Harden-Wolfson

Higher Education in Central Asia Blog (est. 2011)

  • 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

  • Privatizing Kazakhstan’s universities

    Kazakhstan has embraced private ownership of higher education and many other sectors since it became an independent state following the fall of the Soviet Union. This initially stemmed from the economic turmoil of the early and mid-1990s that led to a need to diversify what had once been a totally state owned and funded higher… Read more

  • Uzbek-Tajik higher education relations are warming up

    The honeymoon period of Uzbekistan’s now not-so-new President Mirziyoyev just keeps on going. Even hardened critics of what was once a solidly authoritarian regime in Uzbekistan are having to admit that the reform-driven new leader, who took the reins after the death of longstanding President Karimov following his death in December 2016, may be serious… Read more