Ever wondered how university leaders get chosen?

And specifically, how this process works in Kazakhstan?

I thought so.

A recent article on Kazakh website BNews offers a great ‘Who’s Who’ at the top echelons of Kazakhstan’s higher education system in its report on the competition for the top spot at three of the country’s public universities [ru].

Who’s who in Kazakh higher education?

The report lists the names, qualifications and current positions of no fewer than 42 would-be university leaders (called Rectors in Kazakhstan), all competing for one of the three posts available.

The data was released by the Ministry of Education, which will now pass the candidates’ proposed development programmes to the university in question for a committee to review.

Those who are recommended by the committees will be interviewed by a state-wide committee, made up of representatives of the Kazakhstan Association of Higher Education Institutions, higher education trade unions, elected members of the two houses of parliament, ‘eminent academics’, representatives of the business community and ‘other social actors’. A vote taken by the committee will determine the eventual nominee.

Whilst introduced relatively recently, this selection process has already been used to appoint 16 other Rectors at public universities.

The fact that this process is publicly shared (and the article on BNEws has been ‘liked’ a whopping 22,0000 times on Facebook) and the names of the candidates made available to anyone who might be interested is very impressive. It suggests that notions of democracy are embedding into the Kazakh higher education system and in government more generally, which still faces significant challenges arising from the Soviet legacy and persistent corruption even at the highest levels.

Modelling selection processes

This is not the first process that Kazakhstan has used to select public university leaders. I’ve identified three models that have been in operation at varying points over the last 30 years:

1. Soviet period: State
2. Early years of independence: Academic community
3. Current period: State-society

As a highly bureaucratized and centralized system, it is unsurprising that the Soviet model can be defined by the dominance of the state. During the Soviet Union, university leaders were civil servants, appointed and removed by Moscow. This system has persisted in some post-Soviet systems such as Tajikistan.

On becoming an independent state in 1991, higher education in Kazakhstan experienced a great deal of immediate change. One such reform was to allow the academic community to elect university leaders. Whilst this second model was short-lived, it has left an important footprint in how the Kazakh academic community positions itself and is positioned by the state and society.

This brings us to the current model as outlined above. I’d conceptualize this as a ‘state-society’ model, something of a hybrid between the Soviet period and that of the academic-led era of the early 1990s. The state has staked out its interest in the selection process (after all, these are public universities that are funded primarily by the state) but is making efforts to open this process out to other actors with a vested interest in higher education.

What do you think?

I’d love to hear from people based at universities in Kazakhstan to learn more about how the leadership selection process is perceived, and how democratic you think it really is.

And what about the three models I’ve proposed? Do these make sense? What have I missed?

Finally – what about the voice of students, many of whom now make a financial contribution to their higher education? To what extent are they represented in the three models?