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By Allen Ruff and Steve Horn. On December 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 (unofficial casualty counts ran much higher). Jailings and repression of critics and political opponents of the regime have continued since. The “Zhanaozen Massacre” seemingly went unnoticed by the Western faculty members and administrators working at the recently opened Nazarbayev University, located in 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 U.S.—“partnering” universities.
As a result of deals shaped and brokered by the World Bank in 2009 and 2010, scores of academics 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. In the process, Kazakhstan has become a proving ground for the World Bank’s “education reform” efforts and a revealing case study of the deep-seated “soft power” workings of the U.S. imperial order. Read more...

By Wendy Kopp. Last week, President Obama and a bipartisan group of senators outlined a plan for comprehensive immigration reform. Like the DREAM Act that has stalled for years in Congress, the proposal’s outline hints at an expedited pathway to citizenship for young people who came to the U.S. as children if they attend college or serve in the military. As the details are worked out in the coming weeks, it is critical that legislation include provisions that make it easier for undocumented high schoolers to go to college. Education is the gateway to the American Dream. But today our immigration laws make higher education — a virtual requirement for financial security — out of reach for more than one million undocumented students. Read more...

By Philip Riley. Higher education, 2060: academics are out of a job. All the brand name universities have made all their courses free online, easily doing away with one side of the teaching and learning equation. Pretty soon all the universities realised how much money they could save.
Tutorials have been replaced by Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) with the wisdom of the crowd sourcing all answers from the students themselves. Algorithms update the online course content in response to the question’s popularity – after all, “the customer is always right”.
Eventually no new information is taught, as it is too difficult to produce. There can be no FAQs for new material. So university courses have become useless. People need to find other ways to learn. Universities took up the idea of the customer is always right earlier than 2012. Students became clients. So it became obvious that student evaluation of teaching results determined careers and promotion of lecturers. Read more...

By Philip Riley. Higher education, 2060: academics are out of a job. All the brand name universities have made all their courses free online, easily doing away with one side of the teaching and learning equation. Pretty soon all the universities realised how much money they could save.
Tutorials have been replaced by Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) with the wisdom of the crowd sourcing all answers from the students themselves. Algorithms update the online course content in response to the question’s popularity – after all, “the customer is always right”.
Eventually no new information is taught, as it is too difficult to produce. There can be no FAQs for new material. So university courses have become useless. People need to find other ways to learn. Universities took up the idea of the customer is always right earlier than 2012. Students became clients. So it became obvious that student evaluation of teaching results determined careers and promotion of lecturers. Read more...