Nazarbayev University: Integration of Western and Central Asian Educational Systems

Abstract

In 2010 the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, attended the opening ceremony of a new university in Astana, the capital city of Kazakhstan. The ambitious enterprise, named Nazarbayev University, enjoyed unprecedented privileges, such as complete independence and autonomy from the Ministry of Education and Science in determining its academic policies and curriculum, as well as exorbitant state funding in order to bring in the brightest minds of universal scholarship, and to partner with some of the most globally-reputed universities such as University College London, University of Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University, University Wisconsin-Madison and others. All with the aim of ultimately creating an educational basis and infrastructure for a high-quality international university through adopting Western educational standards, and incorporating them with the best practices of Central Asian and ex-Soviet Union educational systems to offer world-class education to 20,000 students every year. Will the project idea be able to sustain itself for the years ahead and what are the problems in the teaching process and management that the university is experiencing during the first years of its establishment? The aim of this paper is to browse through and analyze some of the topical issues.