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Kasha, Honor, Dignity, and Revolution

Back in the USSR

My first meeting with the dean of the journalism faculty at Kyrgyz State National University (KSNU) in Bishkek did not go well. I had met Anisa Borubayeva in November 1995 while she was on a six-week trip to the United States to visit journalism and communications schools. She said that if I was awarded a Fulbright, KSNU would be happy to host me.

I was excited about the prospect of teaching and working with new colleagues, but I wanted to avoid the mistake many Westerners working in developing countries make—telling people what they need. I planned to listen and be sensitive. After a few minutes of polite conversation, I asked through the interpreter what I thought was the appropriate question.

“As dean, what do you think the main needs of the journalism faculty are?”

Anisa looked uncomfortable. “I really don’t know,” she said. “I was hoping you could tell us what we need.”

And so the conversation went. I asked about the curriculum. The qualifications of the teachers. The facilities and equipment. On almost every topic, Anisa said that she would rely on my expert judgment. As I left her office, she told me how proud she was to have a Fulbright scholar on the faculty. The rector, Sovietbek Toktomushev, the university’s chief academic and administrative officer, had sent her a letter of congratulations. Her star was rising.

After independence, Kyrgyzstan needed all the help it could find in almost every sector of society, including higher education. Western governments and international agencies provided scholarships to teachers for postgraduate study and dispatched a motley crew of teaching help—from Fulbright scholars to Peace Corps volunteers—to the universities. My Fulbright colleague Martha Merrill, who has worked on higher education reform in Kyrgyzstan since the mid-1990s, says the country has welcomed almost every donor-funded initiative, not only because it lacks resources but because it has been open to new ideas. Each donor has its own idea of what Kyrgyzstan needs, and efforts to standardize and maintain quality have been ineffective. University education, she writes, includes “three-year bachelor’s degrees, four-year bachelor’s degrees, five-year diplomas . . . programs based on contact hours, programs using credit hours (some US-style, some European), and universities teaching in Kyrgyz, Russian, English, and Turkish.” The net result, as Martha puts it, is “kasha—literally [in Russian] porridge, with a little of this and a little of that added in, but in slang, a mess.”¹

In the field of journalism education, I could not blame Anisa for a lack of vision and ideas. Historically, journalism in the Soviet Union was a subfield of literature, so education was conducted in faculties of philology (language and literature). Curricula were heavy on theory, stylistics, and literature, with few practical courses. Most teachers, like Anisa, had degrees in philology but little or no professional experience in media. She worked hard, hired young and promising teachers, and aggressively pursued grants and linkages with foreign institutions. As dean, she was one of a new breed of academic entrepreneurs in Central Asia and was credited with reviving a moribund faculty. However, her relations with the university administration were always precarious. The rector had hired her and could fire her if she displeased him.

In the 1990s, Kyrgyzstan more or less merited its “island of democracy” label. In contrast to the other Central Asian republics where Moscow’s rule had been replaced by a new authoritarian regime, Kyrgyzstan held elections that were generally considered fair and transparent. Its president, Askar Akayev, was a political outsider. He had worked as a physicist in the Soviet era, the only Central Asian leader who had not been a Soviet apparatchik. There appeared to be a balance of power between the executive and legislative branches. Politically, if not economically, Kyrgyzstan was making the right moves.

Unfortunately, universities were still floating in an authoritarian Soviet sea. Rectors were political appointees, lording it over their fiefdoms like Soviet commissars, khans, or emirs. Poorly paid teachers had little or no job security and little motivation to do more than show up for class. The old joke—“We pretend to work and you pretend to pay us”—seemed even more apt than in Soviet times, because some had not been paid for months. Students had almost no say in what was going on. Martha was frustrated that the Ministry of Education, to which she was assigned, did not seem much interested in university reform. Administrators and faculty said they could not understand how US universities were free to develop curricula and award their own degrees, rather than follow a national curriculum. The notion of student choice seemed even more outlandish. When Martha told one group that the number of hours a week a student spends in class depends on the major and classes chosen, one vice-rector bristled at the interpreter: “I know you translated that wrong because that can’t be what she said, it can’t be the student’s choice.”

The KSNU journalism faculty occupied one second-floor wing of the main university building (glavni corpus). Like most Soviet-era public buildings, the building looked impressive from the outside—a three-story block with two wings and a large portico, set in grounds facing Frunze Street. Once you got past the bored-looking guard at the front door, the signs of neglect were everywhere. Plaster and paint peeled from the walls, and the bathrooms smelled of urine. Students sat in rows behind fixed wooden desks. In summer, the heat was stifling; in winter, it was so cold that everyone, including the teachers, wore coats and hats. You had to take off your gloves to write on the chalkboard.

Each week brought a new challenge. One was predicting whether or not the students would be there, because the semester calendar was punctuated by numerous holidays. After independence, the government, in a popular attempt to combine traditions, introduced new holidays, but retained or renamed most of the Soviet ones. The New Year was celebrated twice—on January 1 and for three days in March to mark Nooruz (Islamic New Year). Nooruz was followed by the Day of National Revolution (March 24), effectively creating a one-week holiday. There was Eastern Orthodox Christmas in January, Fatherland Defenders’ Day in February to mark the formation of the Red Army, and International Women’s Day in March. May began with International Workers’ Day (May 1), which in post-Soviet political adjustment became Kyrgyzstan People’s Unity Day, followed by Constitution Day (May 5), Remembrance Day (May 8), and the (Great Patriotic War Against Fascism) Victory Day (May 9). Eid al-Fitr (Breaking of the Fast) marked the end of Ramadan, and there were other Muslim holidays adjusted to the lunar calendar. KSNU added its own holidays and subbotniks, days when classes were canceled so that students could pitch in with cleaning, trash pickup, and grounds maintenance at the university.

Sometimes I learned about a holiday in advance, but often it was too late. I showed up for class, and the students were not there. Most internal communication seemed to be oral. There was no bulletin board to post notices about meetings or other matters, and there were no faculty mailboxes; if you needed to contact colleagues, you had to go and find them. The journalism faculty did not have a copying machine (or an overhead projector, the main classroom teaching aid in the mid-1990s) and only one telephone that sometimes didn’t work. It was in Anisa’s office and people were constantly walking in and out to make calls.

Furniture was scanty, but one fixture in most offices was a heavy metal safe. This appeared to be a hangover from Soviet times, when sensitive documents such as the class schedule or the reading list for Journalism 101 were closely guarded secrets. Anisa was constantly locking and unlocking her safe, although all she usually pulled out were file folders of correspondence. Apparently, the most valuable item in the safe was the faculty’s official ink stamp which had to be affixed to all documents to attest to their authenticity.

Security extended to the classrooms, which were locked when not in use, as if someone was going to sneak in and steal the chalk. Some class periods began with a frantic search for the key while the students milled around in the corridor or wandered off. The attempt to keep people honest by locking everything up seemed ironic, given the rampant academic dishonesty afoot. Corruption exists at every level of education in Central Asia, but is probably worst at universities where students or their parents pay bribes for university places, to pass exams, and for grades. On one level, such practices are unethical, but on another they are, if not forgivable, at least understandable. Most university teachers received a pitifully low salary and had to put in many classroom hours to earn it; most taught at other universities or had part-time jobs to scrape out a living. Some had not been paid for months but still showed up for work. Of course, the culture of bribery undermines the fundamental principles of education. Why bother studying if you are going to have to buy the grade anyway? As educational standards plummet, employers question the value of a diploma that may have been bought. As a study by Vanderbilt University of academic corruption in six former Soviet republics including Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan concluded: “By design, one function of education is to purposefully teach the young how to behave in the future. If the education system is corrupt, one can expect future citizens to be corrupt as well.”²

As for cheating, it was so much a part of classroom culture that students performed skits about it at their talent shows. And it had roots in a set of traditional values where your first duty is to your immediate and extended family. When students enter the university, they are assigned to a group; they attend all or most of their classes with the same group of fifteen to twenty students, and often socialize outside class. Away from your biological family, the group becomes your new family; you help group members who are struggling with their studies, sharing notes or the answers to test questions. Even class attendance is a group responsibility. When my Fulbright colleague Harvey Flad, a geography professor, passed out an attendance sheet at the American University in Kyrgyzstan, it came back with twenty signatures, even though only a dozen students were in the room.

I Don’t Read Lectures!

The one issue settled at my first meeting with Anisa was the three courses I would teach in Fall semester. But not without some initial confusion.

“Kakiye lektsii voe chitayete?” Anisa asked. The interpreter translated literally. “Which lectures will you be reading?”

I bristled, and launched into a self-righteous diatribe about how I did not read lectures. As a teacher, my role was to provide students with basic information and resources, and then challenge them to think, ask questions, and conduct their own independent research. There would be in-class activities, open discussions, and debates.

Anisa listened patiently, and told me that of course I was free to conduct my classes in whatever way I saw fit. The phrase chitat’ lektsii (to read lectures), the interpreter added, was simply how you described the courses you were teaching.

I wasn’t so sure. I had already seen teachers in action, and most of the time they were standing at lecterns reading their lectures. The students sat quietly at long wooden desks and took notes. Occasionally, a student would ask a question, but it was almost always to clarify something the teacher had said. The material presented was never disputed. There was no class discussion because there was nothing to discuss. The teacher had said it, so it must be true. Teaching became the process of delivering knowledge, and memorizing it. On tests and oral examinations, students repeated what they had heard, without thinking much about it.

Rote learning has its place if, like our neighbor Dima, you need to recite Pushkin. I told my students that, beyond some basic concepts, I didn’t care what they remembered from my brief lectures; it was their ability to analyze and apply the knowledge and conduct research that was important. Still, it was difficult to combat the passivity that the chitat’ lektsii tradition engendered. In the second semester, I taught a course titled “Contemporary Issues in Journalism” for fourth-year students. I encouraged them to debate ethical issues such as conflict of interest, faking and staging, and invasion of privacy. Some asked questions and offered thoughtful opinions, but at least half of the class seemed bewildered when I asked them what they thought. They felt uncomfortable discussing issues about which apparently there were no correct and clearly defined answers to be regurgitated on a test. These students were in their final year, and all said they wanted to be journalists, but most seemed remarkably unreflective, lacking in intellectual curiosity.

There Will Be Tea