KZBlog

Parliament has agreed to pass legislation giving Nazarbayev University “special status”, meaning that it will be able to set its own curriculum. Nazarbayev University, where students started studying about two weeks ago, has invited Western universities in to run the academic programs University College of London at the moment is running the course for undergraduates. In other words, students at NUA are studying in a British program with British standards, meaning they are actually taking a foundation course this year, necessary for all students who have studied only 11 years in school. The University of Wisconsin is coming in to run the science program, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business will open a branch at NUA, and Harvard and Carnegie Mellon University are also expected to open schools at the new university in Astana in the near future.

The special status will allow these foreign schools to set their own curricula. Though I can’t find an article that spells out the exact nature of the status, university students in Kazakhstan are typically expected to take mandatory classes in Military Training, Kazakh Language, Kazakh History, Law and Society, and Ethics regardless of their major. So this is a big step forward for Kazakhstan in giving a school freedom from the Ministry-of-Education-set curriculum and what some might call the patriotization and socialization aspects of most education in Kazakhstan.

The article from the Central Asia Newswire also quotes an anonymous source on the sensitive issue of whether the president of Nazarbayev University should be a Westerner or a Kazakhstani. Worth reading and thinking about.