Imperial Business School: The World Bank and the Academy in Kazakhstan

 ALLEN RUFF AND STEVE HORN*

[This is a revised version of a piece that appeared in Z-Magazine, February, 2013. A longer more detailed piece initially run by Counterpunch in three installments on December 13th, Dec 14th, and Dec.18th. ]

On Dec. 16, 2011,  Kazakhstan state security forces opened fire on striking oil workers  in the Caspian Sea company town of Zhanaozen. According to the official count, 15 died and upwards of 70 were wounded while unofficial casualty counts ran much higher. Some suggested that as many as 70 died that day. Jailings and repression of critics and political opponents of the regime followed and have actually worsened in the year since.

  

Dead oil worker killed at Zhanaozen, November 16, 2011

The “Zhanaozen Massacre” seemingly went unnoticed by the Western faculty members and administrators working at the recently opened Nazarbayev University, located at the country’s ostentatious new capital, Astana.  Opened in 2010, the mutli-billion dollar showcase university came about through a joint venture involving the country’s authoritarian regime under “Leader of the Nation,” Nursultan Nazarbayev, the World Bank, and a number of major, primarily US “partnering” universities.

As a result of deals shaped and brokered by the Bank in 2009 and 2010, scores of academics have flocked to the resource rich, strategically located Central Asian country. They remain there despite the fact that every major international human rights monitor has cited the regime for its continuing abuse of civil liberties and basic freedoms.

The central Atrium of NU’s campus, fully enclosed, “like a shopping mall in the United States, with roads and buildings inside…”

In the process, Kazakhstan has become a proving ground for the Bank’s “education reform” efforts and a revealing case study of the deep seeded “soft power” workings of the US imperial order. 

 A “Number-One Priority”

Nazarbayev in 2006 called for the establishment of “a unique academic environment” and the “need to create a prestigious, world-class university” in order to improve the resource rich country’s international standing.

Work on the  $2 billion dollar Astana campus began in 2007. The outside planners of what was initially dubbed the “New University of Astana” designed it from the start to become the centerpiece of a totally remodeled market-oriented education system fully tethered to “the West” (meaning, the national and financial interests of the US and its British junior partner).

Astana, constructed since 1997, with Nazarbayev's palace in the foreground

Reflecting the importance of the project by the regime, US envoys meeting with the Kazakhstan Deputy Prime Minister and Nazarbayev insider Yerbol Orynbayev in October 2009 could cable back to Washington that besides Astana, the University was “the government’s number one priority.” Projecting an eventual enrollment of 20,000, the school received its first incoming class of 500 students in September, 2010.

Human Rights, Kazakh Style

"Leader for Life" Nazarbayev: "...Don't let me down."

With reps from the various “partnering institutions” looking on, “Leader for Life” Nazarbayev spoke at the NU campus’ opening ceremony June 2010. Expressing his hope that the new venture would become the “national brand of Kazakhstan,” the “president for life” also offered the school’s first incoming class some godfatherly advice. “Young people should seek studying here…,” he told them. “I agreed it [the university] to be named after me, so don’t let me down.”

A compliant press corps got the message. After all, Nazarbayev family members or cronies control or own the dominant media while independent journalists are subjected to prohibitive fines for publishing anything considered “defamatory” about Nazarbayev, his family or leading government officials. Critical reporters are jailed and physically attacked, while offices of opposition newspapers have been shut down, vandalized or even firebombed.

A  2011 U.S. State Department report on Kazakhstan’s Human Rights Practices, described the country as having “significant human rights problems” including “…restrictions on freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association; and lack of an independent judiciary and due process, especially in dealing with pervasive corruption and law enforcement and judicial abuse.”

Transparency International in 2012 ranked the country as “not free” while Freedom House gave it a worsening “democracy score” of 6.54 (with 1 representing the highest level of democratic progress and 7 the lowest.)

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have long criticized the regime for its violations of international standards regarding workers’ rights, routine repression of political opposition,  impunity of the police, and intimidation and torture of those detained and imprisoned. The mistreatment of immigrants, exploitation of child labor and human trafficking in the country continue to be documented. Recent legislation has placed further limits on  freedom of religion while the post-Zhanaozen repression has continued up to the present.

Critics have characterized the regime as an outright kleptocracy that has siphoned off billions to Nazarbayev and his immediate circles. Corruption and bribery at all levels of government, the judiciary included, have long been considered “part of doing business” in the country. Bribery of school administrators and instructors for admission and grades has also been a long established practice that apparently has continued at NU despite newly instituted “best practices,” according to online discussions.

The Regime’s New Partners

The list of elite institutions holding “strategic partner” contracts with the regime – most of which regularly portray themselves as bulwarks of academic freedom of inquiry, liberal tolerance, “ethical conduct” and the rule of law - is impressive.

A team from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) helped design NU's administrative workings and governance procedures. Carnegie Mellon University’s global subsidiary, iCarnegie landed a Bank-brokered deal to help run the School of Science and Technology.

Experts from the  University of Wisconsin-Madison, famed for its “Wisconsin Idea” progressive tradition but apparently untroubled by the repressive nature of  Nazarbayev’s regime, designed every detail of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Duke received the contract to set up and jointly run NU’s Graduate School of Business, while the University of Pittsburgh is involved with the Center for Life Sciences.

Harvard , with prestigious faculty from its Kennedy School of Government and Business School such as management “guru” Michael Porter intimately involved in shaping the country’s’s post-Soviet path, entered an agreement to establish NU’s medical school. Two U.S. Department of Energy National Labs — the University of Chicago-affiliated Argonne National Laboratory and the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory — are now operating from state of the art campus research facilities.

Additional partners include the UK’s elite University College London (UCL), centrally involved with the country’s broader education restructuring efforts, and faculty from “strategic partner,” Cambridge University, now busy with the NU “Centre for Teacher Excellence.” Experts from the National University of Singapore, far from their authoritarian home, helped create and now manage the Graduate School of Public Policy.

“Great Game”  Players

The NU project came about in a  broader context of international competition and imperial interest, the new “Great Game” for Central Asia. At the center of the region, Kazakhstan sits atop vast reserves of oil and gas, uranium, and additional mineral wealth in an era of increasing global competition for diminishing energy sources.

At Central Asia's heart, strategically vital, resource-rich Kazakhstan (2010)

With its 4,200 mile border with Russia to the north and a 1,100 mile frontier with China to the east, and Iran to the southwest across the Caspian Sea, the country also has major strategic importance for the US. 

Playing its own game, the Nazarbayev regime developed a shrewd “multi-vector” foreign policy to play off the competing interests of the country’s powerful neighbors with those of the US and lesser imperial interests of others including Japan, Germany, Italy.

Myriad US-based multinational corporations, meanwhile, have moved  into every sector of the country’s booming economy. International financial institutions arrived early on, with the World Bank setting up shop in 1992.

Playing their own highly competitive “Great Game,” major universities, in turn, have come on board more recently. The academy’s modern-day missionaries have flocked to Astana bearing promises of progress and development through a new “knowledge economy.”

Enter the “Knowledge Bank”

NU resulted from a number of initiatives closely coordinated by the World Bank, these days self-described as the ‘‘Knowledge Bank” determined to eliminate global poverty through market-centric “education reform.” 

Structured from its inception during World War II to assure U.S. economic supremacy in the post-war world, the Bank has never simply been a lending institution, but rather an instrument of imperial “soft power.” In tandem with other international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), its loan “conditionalities” and “structural adjustment” austerity demands actually functioned to increase national debt and deepen dependency and inequality across the “developing world” through the 1970s and 1980s.

Beginning in mid-1990s under the presidency of James Wolfensohn and his chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, the Bank gradually recast itself as a development agency. Moving away from narrow “make you an offer you can’t refuse” infrastructural loans, it turned toward the shaping of programs and policy through “non-lending technical assistance; what Bank critic Paul Cammack has described as a form of “deep interventionism” -- the fundamental transformation and full integration of potential centers of economic growth through client “country ownership” and “participation.”

Bank strategists in the mid-2000s shifted focus toward “tertiary education” as a sector vital for “progress”. Understanding “knowledge” both as a source of power and as an increasingly valuable commodity, the Knowledge Banksters also came to emphasize the benefits gained from “knowledge transfers” to and from the centers of a globalized “knowledge economy.” Under the new model, the knowledge gained from experience in one country get filtered back to Washington for use as "templates for development" passed off as neutral "best practices" by Bank advisers and hired consultants.

“Knowledge Bank” crtitics Elizabeth Ocampo and Dean Neu have compared its operatives and consultants to the missionaries of an earlier colonialism:

"…If we exchange the black robe of the missionary for a pin-stripe suit — each a symbol of power — and the Bible for a bank ledger, with globalization as the holy grail, we may not be far off from an acceptable analogy of how the World Bank operates today…[Its] practices…are not to be questioned by the congregation. Under the guise of knowing what is best for the people of the borrower country, [their] sacred rites are clearly designed to introduce particular forms of behaviour…" (Doing Missionary Work: The World Bank and the Diffusion of Financial Practices (2008)

The Kazakhstan Initiative

Despite (or because of) the authoritarian but stable nature of its regime. Kazakhstan became a proving ground, of sorts, for the Bank’s “knowledge economy” education initiatives starting in the mid-2000s.

Bank planners saw it as a place to work out new strategies in a relatively well-off “middle income country” not so much in need of massive loans as an unhidden guiding hand. What better environment to work out a strategy for the retooling of a society could there be than an authoritarian cash-flush petrostate?

The Bank proposed plans in late-2007  to upgrade and “commercialize” the nation’s research and development efforts. Part of that blueprint called for the creation of a network of university-housed, market-oriented research and development centers based primarily on U.S. models. Subsequent World Bank proposals for the revamping of the country’s technical and vocational education followed suit.

The Knowledge Bank turn had to overcome one major hurdle -- a financial institution, the Bank had never explicitly been in the higher education business, as such. It looked for assistance to those major universities, the home of countless education policy planners and think-tank experts all eager to enter the new frontiers of the “global knowledge market.”

The JERP

According to the Bank, it received a formal request from the country’s Ministry of Education and Science (MOES) in 2008 to assist in the construction of the “New University at Astana.” But Bank involvement began well before then.

The Bank’s “knowledge economy” specialists, in conjunction with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), had already issued “Higher Education in Kazakhstan” in January 2007. The 226-page report diagnosed problems with the country’s education system as an outmoded but potentially re-workable growth engine in need of major overhaul.

That study, essentially a blueprint for the restructuring of the entire education system, provided the bases for the MOES “sector-reform strategy”. It was produced by the Joint Economic Research Program (JERP), an innovative partnering effort between Bank development advisers and various Kazakhstani apparatchiks.

With the Bank providing the expertise and the regime picking up most of the tab, JERP initiatives during the preceding ten years had provided policy analysis, strategic planning, and ‘best practice options” for various sectors. Those efforts became the cornerstone of the Bank’s “Country Partnership Strategy” and made Kazakhstan “a pioneer in drawing on the Bank’s pool of knowledge…[and] an example to other countries.”

The JERP’s prescription for the renovation of Kazakhstani education called for a rapid transfusion of “Western” expertise, technique and new institutions built around market-driven competitiveness and “commercialization.” Nazarbayev University, viewed as the centerpiece of the entire restructuring effort, would require a US-modeled administrative structure and procedures, curricula, “rules of engagement” with industry, and “twinning arrangements” with top-rate universities around the world. 

Partnership Development 

The challenge was to make sure the new university would have an institutional structure that would “offer the dividends from a knowledge economy” and a sound “internationalization strategy.” With that in mind and the new campus initially projected to open in fall 2009, Bank advisors arranged a JERP “Workshop for the New University” in Dec. 2008.

That two-day Astana meet-up brought together a Bank team of  consultants and MOES officials in an effort to define the “global knowledge” needed “for the successful design and implementation of the New University” and to help develop “a clear, strong governance structure,” a “financing plan,” and a “quality assurance framework.”

“Knowledge Bank” handlers then escorted a high level MOES delegation on a month long, around-the-world “Partnership Development Tour” (PDT) in Feb. 2009. The trip’s prospectus promised the delegation would, “see first-hand a range of governance structures, financing mechanisms, quality assurance systems, internationalization strategies and curriculum development at established, top-ranked universities…, while gaining exposure to the recent experiences of young, emerging universities on the other.”

The objective, according to the Bank, was twofold: “to apply the lessons learned to the establishment and expansion of the new university of Astana…” and for “host institutions to learn about the concept and strategy of the University of Astana.” The Kazakhs and their guides visited multiple institutions, most of which eventually landed a “partnering agreement” from Nazarbayev.

Stops on the PDT globe trot included visits to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Cambridge University, and the University College of London. The journey also included stopovers at Qatar and Singapore, two examples of capitalist development driven by authoritarian state.

Outside Doha, the group visited the Qatar Science and Technology Park at “Education City”, home to a cluster of joint projects with US-based universities including Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas A&M, Virginia Commonwealth and Carnegie Mellon brokered through the Bank -- in some ways the model of things to come at Astana.

Delegates also met with higher ups at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Named after the mini-state’s long-time “benevolent dictator” and “minister mentor” long admired by Nazarbayev, the school was a forerunner in the establishment of “partnering relationships” with major universities in the U.S., UK, Japan, and China. It soon won a “twinning” contract to help create and run NU’s Graduate School of Public Policy, currently slated to become the leading research and training facility for Central Asia’s politicians and state bureaucrats.

While at Cambridge, the Kazakhs were greeted by Anne Lonsdale, at the time Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University. As the NU got underway in 2010, Lonsdale briefly became the university’s Provost with oversight over the vetting process for many of the Western faculty hired to teach at Astana. 

Once World Bank's in-country officer, Aslan Sarinzhipov is now key administrator of Naz. U.

Upon arriving in Astana, Lonsdale her other staff associate, the “Chairman of the Executive Council of the University,” Aslan Sarinzhipov. Formerly the World Bank’s in-country operations officer and previously an economic envoy at the Kazakhstan Embassy in Washington, Sarinszhipov was the interim President of the “New University of Astana.”

As part of NU’s “Executive Staff,” Lonsdale worked alongside Shigeo Katsu, the decades-long World Bank career man, former regional vice president for its Europe and Central Asia division, and now the Rector (President) of the University.

Former World Bank VP for Europe & Central Asia, Shigeo Katsu,  now Rector of Nazarbayev U.

The University College London

In April 2009, JERP organizers brought “key potential partners” including representatives from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Cambridge, the University College of London, Singapore’s National University and others to Astana for a “Partnership Development Forum.” Following an NU campus tour, they met with Kazakh officials and Bank go-betweens to finalize “partnering agreements.”

One of the first to sign was the University College of London (UCL).   It took charge of a campus-based “foundation program” designed to tutor incoming NU students in academic and technical English. The College signed an additional “partnering” contract in 2011 to help run the NU School of Engineering.

Michael Worton, the UCL rep who sealed the deal, understood the Great Game stakes.  Noting that, “Kazakhstan is emerging as a key strategic partner for the UK,” he continued, "It also is a country… committed to modernisation and internationalism (sic) … [with] enormous natural resources.”

Penn’s Part

Personnel from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) became involved early on in planning of NU. Its experts helped develop the university’s governance structure and policies.

According to the GSE’s account, a “chance encounter” led to the Penn-NU partnership. As the story goes, in Oct. 2009 Alan Ruby, at the time a guest lecturer on global education at the GSE, happened to be working as a consultant with the Kazakhstan finance ministry, “when word came about President Nazarbayev’s plans.”

Telling his Kazakhstani associates that it was “not just a matter of magicking up a university,” he informed them that they had to think about admissions, curriculum, faculty, governance, etc.. When asked if he knew how to do such things, he informed his Astana colleagues that he just happened to know people at Penn who had the needed expertise.

At the time, Ruby was working as a private consultant for the World Bank, his former employer. As an operative with “a longstanding interest in education reform, globalization, alliances between unions and governments, and the role of education in developing economies,” Ruby earlier had led development programs  in China, Vietnam and Indonesia as director of the Bank’s East Asia “Human Development Sector.”

As a result of Ruby’s “chance encounter,” a Kazakh planning team went to Penn in Feb. 2010 for a one-week crash course on university administration led by the heads of the GSE’s higher education management division and other Penn experts.

While the Kazakh planners enlisted help with academic programs elsewhere, the Penn advisors assisted with larger institutional issues. As a result of GSE input, Kazakhstan’s rubber stamp parliament passed legislation requiring all the country’s colleges and universities to develop Boards of Trustees by 2020. The Penn team, according to Ruby, also assisted in the recruitment of NU’s Rector -- the former World Bank man, Shigeo Katsu.

Penn GSE lecturer and former World Bank hand Alan Ruby,  now Kazakhstan education adviser

Continuing on as both a Bank consultant and a NU advisor, Ruby helped plan the Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools, a national network of secondary schools created to prepare elite students for technocratic and managerial career track programs at NU. He also has played an ongoing role in restructuring the country’s education system through its “National Education Development Program.”

Dennis Detray: Man Behind the Curtain

Dennis De Tray, another long-time World Bank operative, has come to play a central role in the development of Nazarbayev U and the country’s efforts at “education reform.” 

 Former World Bank operative and apologist for Indonesia's Suharto, Nazarbayev advisor Dennis De Tray

Currently a “private consultant” to the Astana regime, he initially received his MA in 1972 from the University of Chicago Economics Department, where he studied with “free market” proponent and neoliberal ideologue, Arnold “Al” Harberger, best known his instrumental in implementing free-market reforms in 1970s Chile under the Augosto Pinochet dictatorship.

Upon leaving Chicago, De Tray worked for over a decade as a researcher at the RAND Corporation. He worked at the World Bank from 1983-2006. While at the Bank, De Tray held multiple positions around the world, ranging from Central America and the Dominican Republic, to Indonesia, and eventually made his way to Central Asia and Kazakhstan.

He was World Bank Country Director for Indonesia, stationed in Jakarta from July 1997-March 1999, a period coinciding with the end of the US-backed Suharto dictatorship.

Under De Tray’s watch as the Bank’s Country Director those years, an estimated $25 million in World Bank funds earmarked for development projects, disappeared, siphoned off  by the kleptocratic regime. The Wall Street Journal subsequently noted that “World Bank officials knew corruption in Bank-funded projects was common, but never commissioned any broad reports tracking how much money was lost to it.”

A subsequent US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report  stated that “Dennis De Tray ignored internal reports detailing program kickbacks, skimming and fraud because he was unwilling to upset the Suharto family and their cronies whom he believed were responsible for Indonesia’s economic boom.”

Responding to the GAOs findings and other criticism of the Bank’s practices in Indonesia, DeTray in 2006 stated that there was “a trade-off between dealing with corruption and the pace with which we improve the lives of the poor. The tougher we are on corruption and the corrupt, the less we will improve the lives of the poor today.”

Following Suharto’s death in Jan. 2008,  De Tray suggested that critics should shut up and give the dictator his due: “I have taken a good deal of grief over the years since I left Indonesia as an apologist for Suharto. Why? Because I have argued that the bad that he did — and some of it was horrific — should be balanced against the good, not for the sake of Suharto but for the sake of development,” De Tray wrote. “To see Suharto as just another corrupt dictator is to risk losing the lessons from one of the great development success stories of all times.”

De Tray, touting increases in per capita income as a measure of such “success,” neglected to mention that today, “120 million citizens…live on less than two dollars a day” and that tens of millions live without bare necessities, such as “clean water, proper nutrition, healthcare, education, clothing and shelter,” according to a Jan. 2012 Inter Press Service.

De Tray and NU

After Indonesia, and a stint working for the IMF in Hanoi, Vietnam, he then went on to served for roughly five years as the Bank’s Director for its Europe and Central Asia Region, based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. De Tray served in this capacity at the same time that the future President of NU, Shigeo Katsu was working as the Bank’s Vice President for the Region.

Upon leaving the Bank, De Tray became the first Vice President of a Bank-funded NGO, the Center for Global Development (CGD), a self-described “think and do” development think-tank. In 2009 CGD’s funding came from the likes of Goldman Sachs, Chevron, Cargill, DeBeers, and Nestle, among others. In 2006, it received funds from Citigroup, Nike, Microsoft, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the ultra-conservative Smith Richardson Foundation, and many others.

CGD’s Board of Directors also has many ex-World Bank employees, including Larry Summers, the former Harvard University President who from 2009-2010 worked as the head of the Obama White House’s National Economic Council. During Summers’ brief stint as Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1991-1993, De Tray worked as his Senior Economic Advisor.

De Tray is also a Principal at Results for Development (R4D), founded in late-2007 as a “high-quality research approach of a traditional think tank with the capacity to turn that research into action on the ground in developing countries.” Also listed as an Expert for R4D is Alan Ruby, associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Grad School of Education  and today a key advisor for the restructuring of Kazakhstan’s education system.

R4D’s funders include the World Bank, the Government of Kazakhstan, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Rockefeller Foundation, among others.

Under the auspices of R4D, De Tray helped lay the groundwork of what would become NU while working as a senior advisor for “Kazakhstan 2030,” the country’s economic development plan for the next two decades. A key portion of the Kazakhstan 2030 “Blue Print For Success” — as it is referred to as by Kazakh state media — deals with higher education and the creation of “world-class universities.”

Dennis Detray greets the  "Leader for Life" at Nazarbayev U.

De Tray now serves on the Board of Directors of the National Analytical Center. Among NAC’s projects are Human Capital Development, where one of the Strategic Initiatives is fulfilling the dictates of Kazakhstan 2030.

“Quality of higher education will correspond to the best world standards and practices,” reads the NAC website. “The effective system of technical education and vocational training, integrated into the world educational sector, will be created.”

Most significantly, De Tray has also served as a key “go-between” for Kazakhstan’s government, facilitating meetings between university partners, upper-level NU management, and high level Kazakh government officials.

A case in point: De Tray accompanied a high-level Kazakh delegation including the country’s Deputy Prime Minister Yerbol Orenbayev and then-President of “New University of Astana” (now NU), the former employee of the World Bank, Aslan Sarinzhipov to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in March 2010 for the signing of contract to assist in the creation of NU’s Social Sciences and Humanities Department.

De Tray greets Karim Massimov, NU Supreme Board of Trustees member and former Prime Minister (now Nazarbayev’s Chief-of-Staff) as fellow Board Member at June 2011 NU international partners meeting.

A key liaison for the World Bank-assisted "partnering projects," De Tray was also present for a June 2011 Astana meeting of representatives from NU’s international university partners and Kazakhstan’s then-Prime Minister Karim Massimov (currently “President-for-Life” Nazarbayev's Chief-of-Staff). 

A deal maker and man of many hats, Dennis Detray pictured here in Iraq, 2008

[For more on DeTray, including his stints in US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, as a consultant and contractor for the Pentagon, see: "The Men Behind the Curtain...," Counterpunch, (December 18, 2012)]

English Only

The first crop of NU students began classes in Sept. 2010 taught by a largely non-Kazakh faculty with instruction entirely in English, an entrance requirement. 

The country’s entire academic curriculum had previously been taught in Russian or Kazakh. But according to official accounts, Nazarbayev followed the advice of his fellow autocrat, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and made English NUs primary language, viewed as the lingua franca for international scientific, technical and business success.

Alongside Kazakh counterparts increasingly mindful of the Anglo-American comparative advantage in higher education, the Knowledge Bank’s advisers and academic specialists also promoted an “English only” curriculum.

Critics of such requirements have described them as a form of “linguistic imperialism,” a means of tethering client state institutions to U.S. corporate and strategic interests. English currently is being mandated and taught at all levels in the Kazakh system, beginning with pre-school.

“Autonomy”

Early in 2011, Kazakhstan’s rubber stamp parliament unanimously passed and President Nazarbayev signed a new law, “On the status of Nazarbayev University, Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools and Nazarbayev Fund.” The enactment granted NU and the “Intellectual Schools” a range of “special status” exemptions from Education Ministry regulations and mandates.

The law granted NU administrators the authority to set academic and governance practices in line with “Western educational standards.” It also called for the “integration of education, science and industry – the inseparability of educational process from scientific and practical activities in [the] University and… [the] provision of strategic partnerships with science and business organizations.”

A line in the enactment narrowly defined the “principle of academic freedom” solely as “independence of the University… in defining and selection of educational programs, forms and methods of implementation of education activities, and the directions of conducting scientific research.”

The “guiding principle” dealing with “Autonomy and Academic Freedom,” states that the University will,

[E]nsure independence and collegiality in management and decision making based on democratic principles and personal responsibility of each individual involved; guarantee academic freedom of teachers and researchers within their research, and educational activities.(emphasis ours)

While seemingly enshrining “autonomy” and “academic freedom,” the new law also granted ultimate authority over the University, its feeder Instructional Schools and its specially created endowment fund to a “Supreme Board of Trustees” comprised entirely of Nazarbayev loyalists and personally chaired by the “Leader for Life.”

The Nazarbayev Fund

The new autonomy law formally establishment of the “Nazarbayev Fund,” designed to emulate self-sustaining university endowments in the U.S. and elsewhere. Like much else associated with the University, the World Bank assisted in setting up the Fund. Its investments are currently managed by Cambridge Associates, a multinational leader in the handling of major university endowments. 

With no successful alumni on hand, initial contributions to the fund came from “some of Kazakhstan’s world-class companies, such as its petroleum and mining giants.” Wealthy donors with close ties to the regime immediately ponied up. The Kazakh-based mining multinational, Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), largely controlled by three Forbes 500 billionaires and Nazarbayev associates, ponied up $98 million to the total endowment,  estimated to be worth $370 million by mid-2011. 

Heavily invested in mineral mines in Africa, Brazil and elsewhere, ENRC has been subject to a number of investigations surrounding allegations of corrupt investment practices and “insider trading”.

Industrial Knowledge

The restructuring of Kazakhstan’s education system with Nazarbayev U. at its center has had nothing to do with the values of liberal democracy or academic freedom. Except, of course, in some of the self-serving rhetoric of those signing contracts with the regime or perhaps some academics who somehow believe their presence as the bearers of “Western values” will induce a positive change “over time.”

Still underway, that restructuring has had everything to do with serving corporate demands for “applied science” geared to industrial needs and the “commercialization” of any and all intellectual property and discoveries. Fully operational, the system will systematically turn out a technocratic and scientific “elite of the future,”– a corps of technicians, administrators and bureaucrats in service to an authoritarian state and its corporate partners, foreign and domestic.

Member of the NU’s administrative Executive Council, Kadisha Dairova — the former staffer at Kazakhstan’s Washington embassy who administered the state’s “study abroad” Bolashak Program – stated it clearly.

“Industry and the university must cooperate, otherwise the universities graduate students with skills that aren’t applicable. Industry must tell us what kind of students to produce and train.” In that vein, the University has set up its own advisory Industrial Board comprised of executives from a number of firms to assure “education-research-industry integration.”

Dairova candidly spoke of NU as “a unique project that was from the outset created as a testing ground for new innovative educational and research projects…” She explained elsewhere that, “…Nazarbayev University is a kind of educational and scientific hub of Kazakhstan and in the future will be one for Central Asia and the entire post-Soviet space.”

While some conservative academics and ideologues have long claimed that the “free market” and democracy are inextricably tied together, the program developers and World Bank operatives have long understood that dictatorial regimes can be quite efficient in propelling economic growth and industrial development. The Kazakh leadership, despite its public relations lip service to “democracy,” “autonomy,” and “academic freedom” encoded in the law but violated in practice has certainly understood that.

The 2012 Freedom House country report framed it well, stating “Kazakhstan has used the rhetoric of reform and democratization to appease the West without demonstrating a genuine commitment to these processes in practice.”