United Nations conference on sustainable development
RIO +20, United Nations Conference on sustainable Development
Higher Education Sustainability Initiative – Osh State University-OSU
Osh State University-OSU
Inclusion of environmental studies in Osh State University curricula in undergraduate and graduate studies;
– Organize trainings on sustainable development for professionals and practitioners in related fields;
– Fostering a human and social policy (diversity, equality, equal opportunities, quality of life, solidarity, human development);
– Encourage sustainable lifestyle on campus;
– Reinforce research and practice in environment and sustainability;
– Participation in regional partnership for sustainable development;
– To be actively involved in regional and national sustainable development projects;
– Share our increasing knowledge and expertise on sustainability more widely through partnerships and community engagement.
Through maintenance of projects already underway.
| Deliverables | |
| Deliverable | Date |
| Participation in regional partnership for sustainable development | 2015 |
| Reinforce research and practice in environment and sustainability | 2015 |
| Resources devoted to delivery | |
| Type | Details |
| Staff / Technical expertise | Expertise of student and faculty dedicated to sustainable development |
– See more at: http://www.uncsd2012.org/index.php?page=view&type=1006&menu=153&nr=178#sthash.r1ytkWfn.dpuf
The following opinions, recommendations, and conclusions of the author are his/her own
and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of IREX or the US Department of State. 1
W W W . I R E X . O R G
RESEARCH IN CONTEXT
Buttercup was right. In Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S.
Pinafore, she sang, “Things are seldom what they
seem” (Let’s Sing It, 2005). Three recent
publications on higher education in Central Asia
make the same point. Voldemar Tomusk (2011),
writing about the spread of the European-originated
Bologna Process and reforms related to it in Central
Asia, notes (57) that the Bologna Process “appears
in the Central Asian context largely as a political
and economic instrument,” rather than as a
mechanism for educational improvement. Todd
Drummond (2011), recalling the work of Margaret
Archer, writes (130): “Because societal needs are
not always the driving force when political actors
with their own … interests push agendas …
determining actors’ rationales and motives and
interpreting behavior is not always a straightforward
task.” Alan DeYoung (2011) almost quotes
Buttercup: “Nothing is quite as is seems in Kyrgyz
higher education,” he writes (143), noting that
“mandatory” attendance policies are not mandatory,
that “deals” regarding failed exams can be
arranged, and that latent functions of higher
education, such as keeping masses of youth out of
the job market, are more important than the
manifest functions of education.
In attempting to describe the current status of the
three major universities in Osh – Osh State
University, Osh Technical University, and the former
Kyrgyz-Uzbek University, which, in the last year,
has been calling itself Osh State Social University –
I encountered the Buttercup problem. The
ethnicized violence of June 2010 (Reeves, 2010) is
never far from anyone’s mind (Tucker, 2011), and
friends in Osh told me horrific stories, yet I also was
assured on a number of occasions that colleagues
of different ethnicities who had worked together for
Osh State University, main building, with a
sign welcoming applicants (in Kyrgyz) and
Suleyman’s Mountain in the background.
curricula faculty will need to teach have not yet
been written by the Ministry of Education;
designs for a new system for faculty
compensation, necessary since the current one
is based on contact hours, have not yet been
considered; arrangements for licensing every
degree offered anywhere in the country (since,
except for the few Bachelor’s and Master’s
already offered, they will all be new degrees)
appear not even to be on the drawing board;
and confusion extends even to which degrees
will be included, with an administrator at the
Ministry of Education who did not want his/her
name to be used telling me that Engineering
would remain a 5-year degree and former pro-
rector at Osh Technical University telling me
Engineering would become a 4-year degree
(Tashbaev, A. M. 2011). Such educational
questions remain unanswered because
improved teaching and learning are not the
reasons for the change. Entering “the world
educational space,” not being left behind when th
years in the universities continued to do so with no ill
will, and that educated people did not become
involved in such conflict. The major issue everyone
in the universities was discussing was the planned
shift from diploms and kandidat nauks to Bachelor’s
and Master’s degrees, and the accompanying shift
from a contact hour system to a credit hour system,
mandated for the 2012-2013 academic year, yet the
neighboring Kazakhstan has become the 47
country accepted into the Bologna Process, the
belief that Kyrgyzstani diplomas will be accepted
anywhere in the world and that graduates can
work anywhere in the world if only those
educational structures were changed – these
were the considerations I heard, from all except
a few observers, at both the Ministry of
Education and at the universities in Osh. 2
RESEARCH PROCESS AND RESULTS
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
My methodology combined being a participant
observer with face-to-face interviews and multiple
visits to the university campuses, including all six
Osh State locations. In a week in Bishkek and three
weeks in Osh, I conducted seventeen formal
interviews and held many informal conversations
with faculty, students, graduates, and former
administrators. Four of the formal interviews were
with staff at the Ministry of Education in Bishkek, six
interviews were at Osh State University, three at
Osh State Social University (an administrator, a
professor, and a student), three at Osh Technical
University, and one with a professor from the Osh
Humanitarian and Pedagogical Institute. I also
collected printed university documents, where
available, took photographs of information posted
on bulletin boards on the various campuses, and set
up a Google Alerts for each university. I reviewed a
total of sixteen issues of thirteen different
newspapers distributed in Osh, three based in Osh
and eleven nation-wide, six in Kyrgyz, seven in
Russian, looking for advertisements for the
preomnayii komissii (applicant intake periods) for
the universities. (Although I do not read Kyrgyz, I
can recognize the names of the universities, and
one nation-wide Kyrgyz-language paper contained a
Russian-language advertisement for a Bishkek
university.)
FINDINGS
My first “finding” is less a finding of the research
than a finding about doing research in Kyrgyzstan.
Although my aim, as outlined in my proposal, was
simply to describe the current status of the three
major universities in Osh, information has value,
particularly in a post-conflict environment in a
presidential election year. Therefore, information is
not readily shared. For example, I wanted to obtain
enrollment numbers for the universities for 2009-
2010 and 2010-2011, and projections for the 2011-
2012 academic year. This data is not available from
the sources I have consulted, including the Ministry
of Education website and university websites (when
operating) and Facebook pages, with the exception
of some OSU data found in an RFE/RL article (Few
Turkmen, 2010). A Kyrgyzstani colleague with close
connections to the Ministry of Education has been
trying to assist me in obtaining this data, so far
without success.
A related “finding” concerns the reticence of
individuals to make comments for the record,
even when speaking in their official positions
about topics such as the transition to the
Bachelor’s and Master’s degree structure and
the implementation of credit hours. For example,
none of the four people I interviewed at the
Ministry of Education was willing to have his or
her name used, even though all clearly were
speaking in their official roles about policies that
had been approved at levels above them.
Similarly, a highly-placed administrator in Osh
insisted that he was not authorized to speak for
his university and would neither sign a consent
form nor allow me to mention his name, even
though a substantial part of our conversation
consisted of his describing the university’s
international linkages and student achievements
in Olympiads and other contests.
