Emma Harden-Wolfson

Higher Education in Central Asia Blog (est. 2011)

  • New Year, new you? Father Christmas redesigned, Uzbek style

    Uzbekistan has bowed out of 2012 with a final “fingers up” to one of the best loved Soviet traditions, that of Father Frost (Дед Мороз or Father Christmas, reimagined for the Soviet New Year holiday) and Snow Maiden (Снегурочка – she has no European/American equivalent that I’m aware of). uznews.net has a remarkably critical article… Read more

  • The state of higher education in Kazakhstan

    Happy new year! This repost is of an interesting interview with Dr. Mukash Burkitbayev, vice rector of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The interview was undertaken by Eurasianet, originally posted at http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66339 with a video of the interview. The transcript is reprinted below: Dr. Mukash Burkitbayev is the vice rector of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in… Read more

  • First National Student Council in Kazakhstan – A Step Forward for the Student Voice?

    Good news for students in Kazakhstan! Here’s the official government line from Murat Abenov, Deputy Kazakh Minister of Education and Science: As soon as young people get an opportunity to get their message across through their organisations, I think our decisions will have a higher quality and will be more approximate to their problems. Suggestions by… Read more

  • The student experience – Kyrgyz students in Russia (repost)

    This is a repost of a Eurasia Net article; the original article can be found at http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66205 Kyrgyzstan: Central Asian Students in Russia Find Friendship and Bigotry In mid-2010, when 20-year-old Sultan Temirzhan uulu left Kyrgyzstan to attend university in St. Petersburg, he was unprepared for the big city noise and the White Nights of summer.… Read more

  • African Universities and the Global Rankings

    Originally posted on Registrarism: Should African universities be concerned with the global league tables? Inside Higher Ed has a really good piece on African universities and the impact of the international rankings. Essentially the challenge for Africa is that the global league tables use metrics which simply don’t favour the continent’s institutions: Any observer of… Read more

  • Tajik students not allowed to attend foreign-run events

    Having read about this last week, I was all set to think about the implications of the rather bizarre announcement from the Tajik Ministry of Education that they would be banning students from attending events run by foreign organisations. However, the kind people at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting have done this for… Read more