After over 15 years in the making, I’m delighted to learn that the University of Central Asia (UCA) is finally ready to admit it first degree-level students for undergraduate courses at the Naryn campus in the Kyrgyz Republic this September. UCA’s recent news release further hints that the Khorog campus in Tajikistan will be operational from fall/autumn 2017, with the final campus in Tekeli, Kazakhstan, currently scheduled to open in 2019.

The process of creating a brand new university is riddled with challenges, and UCA’s mission is further complicated by its multi-campus, multi-country nature and the enormity of building not just a campus but making significant investment in the surrounding infrastructure as well (you want a university in remote south-east Tajikistan? OK, go build some roads to get there from the nearby town, lay the electricity lines and make sure there is running water…).

Determining the ethos of the institution: what it will teach, what kind of graduates it wants to produce, how it will operationalise mobility between the campuses and so on, has been another major challenge. I was involved in the development of curriculum materials at UCA’s outset and from my two year stint working for what was then the Aga Khan Humanities Project (AKHP), I was able to get an insight into the abundant complexities that were involved. The curriculum being created was genuinely multi-disciplinary and examined viewpoints that went well beyond the tired Western hegemonic discourses so common in university courses around the world these days. The materials that emerged were genuinely transformational and I strongly hope that the first two years of the undergraduate courses – which are billed by UCA as ‘rigorous core curriculum modelled on North American liberal arts degree programmes’ – have not diverged greatly from the AKHP model.

Taking these physical and intellectual challenges into account, it therefore comes as little surprise that the undergraduate programmes are only now being launched. The students who join the first ever UCA cohort will be true pioneers of a different model of learning and seeing the world and I am truly excited and inspired to watch their journeys unfold.

UCA’s news story on the admissions round can be found at http://www.ucentralasia.org/news.asp?Nid=1042.