Philosophy in Kazakhstan

This is the twenty-sixth installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a series that gives a sense of what the philosophy profession looks like outside of the Anglophone West. 

This guest post is written by Vladimir Krstić, Philosophy Assistant Professor at Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan. 

The first thing that comes to one’s mind when hearing the word ‘Kazakhstan’ is Borat. In reality, however, the first thought should be amazing job opportunities. Kazakhstan is a developing country but it is developing fast. The capital, formerly known as Astana but now Nur-Sultan, is growing faster than one can keep track of. This is a perfectly normal course of events. Kazakhstan is a young but vast country, the 9^th largest in the world in terms of physical size, with 18.5 million inhabitants. After a long period of being under the strong influence of Russia and the Soviet Union, Kazakhs are now re-discovering their language and national identity, and they are building their country according to their own preferences. The country is secular, multi-ethnic, and all religions are highly respected: Eastern Orthodox Christmas (7^th of January), for example, is a national holiday, even though the country is predominantly Muslim. Kazakhstan is rich in oil and gas and thus it can afford to attract a skilled labour force and provide them with exceptional work conditions. For these reasons, this country offers many possibilities for excellent employment, philosophers included. Most foreigners work in the oil and gas industry in the south of the country but a very nice job can be found in cities like Nur-Sultan and Almaty.

The population of Nur-Sultan is about 1.2 million. This is a young and modern city, carefully planned and built to be a capital, but constructed in a place in which gulags were mainly built in Soviet times (and we do have quite a few former gulags in the neighbourhood). The settlement was founded in 1830 as Akmola, in Soviet Times it became Tselinograd, in 1998 Astana (which means ‘capital’ in Kazakh), and in 2019 it was renamed to Nur-Sultan in honour of the first president of independent Kazakhstan, Nur-Sultan Nazarbayev. Pretty much everything in Kazakhstan carries his name: airports, universities, streets, and so on. Living in Astana is a very interesting experience. On the one hand, you get to live in a very safe city that is developing in a fascinating direction and with amazing pace, with wide boulevards and extraordinary buildings designed by some of the world’s leading architects, with bright lights and luxurious commodities: some shopping malls have tropical beaches with sand from the Maldives. You can easily imagine how magnificent the place will look in 10–20 years, when everything is finished and the millions of planted trees finally grow – at the moment, most of them is only slightly taller than me. But, on the other hand, you get to live through a ruthless 5-month winter with temperatures that go down to -40 degrees Celsius (-40 degrees Fahrenheit) accompanied by the cold wind of the steppe. The rough weather makes you appreciate the architecture or fantasize about the glorious future of the city much less, but the life here is still rather comfortable; the city is well prepared for the winter.

The biggest and the most liveable city in Kazakhstan (and one of the nicest cities I have ever visited) is Almaty, the former capital. This place is an absolute gem of Central Asia (along with Tashkent and Samarkand in Uzbekistan, Tbilisi in Georgia, and Baku in Azerbaijan – yes, I’m dead serious!). A city surrounded by beautiful mountains and lakes, with ski resorts and water-sport parks, with lots of trees and green parks, full of friendly and chill people always ready to help, it really has a lot to offer. Almaty also houses many universities, but (to my knowledge) only a few tend to go for international hires. KIMEP University regularly hires international faculty and the Kazakh-German University has a few foreign faculty but I was unable to find any philosophers employed by either. A talented philosopher should instead turn their eyes towards Nur-Sultan, and Nazarbayev University.

Despite the difficult to pronounce name (guess how it got it) and the fact that it is buried under a mountain of snow and ice for a good part of the year, Nazarbayev University (NU) is an amazing place to work. The university was launched in 2010 as a premier national and regional university, partnered with internationally recognized names in higher education. The university is still rather small – 4663 students according to the most recent statistics (50/50 female to male ratio) – and thus it is not ranked yet but it is a very good university with 75% international faculty and 34%/66% female to male ratio. The strategic partner of the School of Sciences and Humanities, where the Department of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies is located, is the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Admission to NU is highly competitive and the students are some of the most academically gifted in Kazakhstan: 98% have merit-based scholarships. Most students participate in the NU foundation year program (a year in which they are being prepared for the kind of education they will get at NU) or they come from Nazarbayev Intellectual schools (high schools for talented children that prepare them for NU) and thus they enter NU with extensive English language training and academic preparation.

Students are extremely smart, polite, hard-working, but also very competitive. Their English is generally very good, professors are highly regarded, and it is not uncommon for students to express a lot of gratitude and enthusiasm or to ask for additional readings. One downside is that they are not really comfortable in performing autonomous tasks – they are awesome in following orders but they lack some skills typically nurtured in the U.S. or European universities – and so they sometimes need careful guidance. This mindset is a consequence of their social circumstances, they are used to grading rubrics, for instance, rather than an inability to think in a particular way (the students are great in challenging views) and therefore it can be changed, which is a particularly fun and rewarding endeavour – and, in the end, this is what we are paid for. If you design your course in a way that will force them to think outside the box and to show a high level of autonomy, if they know that this is what you really want, and if you give them rough guidelines on how to do it, they will excel and be super happy and grateful for taking your course. As I said, our students are tremendously bright and talented. As a lecturer, I personally found courses designed in this way both extremely fun to teach and rewarding. I have resisted the grading rubric demands without any difficulty and discovered that students actually have loads of fun doing some ‘real’ philosophical work. Most students will respect you if they see that you know what you are doing and that you respect them, no matter which grade they get in the end.

The university campus consists of school buildings, staff housing (townhouses and apartments), sports centres (one with a brand new, Olympic-size swimming pool), two gyms, outdoor sports centres, grocery shops, coffee shops, cafeterias, three kindergartens, and of course laboratories and other stuff relevant for teaching. Buildings on campus are connected with skywalks (above-ground tunnels) and so the winter will not prevent anyone from going to the swimming pool or the gym during their lunch break or after work. The campus is very liveable and it will grow more so. The speed at which they build in Kazakhstan is remarkable, but so is their ability to mess things up, so I would expect everything and nothing (it’s kind of fun when you think about it, like Hegel’s dialectics practically applied to construction by a drunk mason). In any case, even as is, the campus offers enough to its residents, and there is a giant shopping mall nearby.

The teaching requirement is 2/2 for Professors and 4/4 for Instructors, with 1 contact hour a week per course for everyone, with very few administrative duties. There are sometimes postdoctoral positions, but they tend to be associated with particular grants and reserved for Kazak nationals. The most likely way to enter Nazarbayev University as a non-Kazak philosopher is as an Ethics Instructor or an Assistant professor. The teaching staff is paid in tenge (local currency) but tied to a fixed US dollar amount and everyone is eligible to apply for the so-called Social Policy Grant with a value of $10,000 to be used in the first two years of the contract. Other grants are also available and, to my knowledge, they require cooperation with at least one other university from Kazakhstan. Everyone employed by NU also gets a relocation allowance to come to Nur-Sultan and plane return tickets home twice per year. The school year starts in August and ends in May (although there is a summer semester). The programs emphasize student-oriented learning, with small class sizes and a low student-to-faculty ratio. All classes are taught in English.

The whole system is based on the US model, with progression from Assistant to Associate and later to Full Professor. One salient difference is that getting promoted does not involve getting tenure. The contract standardly renews every three years. Promotion depends on publications (philosophers we hire only publish in high impact journals), one’s previous rank (if applicable), on the recommendations by international experts who will examine one’s publication record, and on the time spent working at the university. The rule is that a person should have been 4 years in rank before being considered for a promotion but she can be considered for promotion after 2 years if she was in the same rank in another university.

All philosophers working at NU are expats and we work together with historians in one department. The department is fairly large; our research strength is much bigger than what one would expect, and we get along really well. Many of the historians are experts in the history of the region and speak Russian. Most people working at the NU do not speak Russian, and living on campus does not require speaking Russian. That said, I would warmly recommend learning at least few words of Russian for those wanting to live here. Almost everyone in Kazakhstan is bilingual (they speak Russian and Kazak), but not many people speak English. Although one can have a comfortable life living on campus, life is much richer if one is willing to extend oneself beyond the campus, and for you to be able to experience that, knowledge of some Russian is very useful.

In the end, allow me to take stock. These are the upside of working at NU: generous salary, international medical insurance, return plane tickets home (twice per year), free housing, low teaching load, and nice research funding. The disadvantages are few but some are important. The most important (for me, at least) is the weather. Just thinking about the winter gives me chills. Some other disadvantages are bureaucracy, a poor banking system, the language barrier, and the cultural barrier. The bureaucratic apparatus in Kazakhstan is not only gigantic, it is also rather dysfunctional. So, not only that you will likely need to keep piles of paper for everything, you might experience delays and mistakes and deal with various problems in your daily work routines. The language and cultural barriers can make true integration a challenge. This problem, of course, is not unique to Kazakhstan and, whether and to what extent this is a problem will depend on whether and how much one intends to get integrated into the society. But none of this should deter a person from applying for a position here. This truly is an amazing opportunity and a great place to be.

Comments

[Mike Titelbaum]

UW-Madison is very proud of its partnership with NU. For a while we had NU undergrads coming to take summer classes in Madison every year. They were great, their English was excellent, and they were among the top students in my logic class every summer!

[T]

This is really fascinating. Thanks!

[jakub]

I'm wondering whether the author could have been more critical of the democratic deficit of the country. How many students from families critical of the government could enter the university? How prevalent is corruption? Is there any corruption at the university?

And the names are ridiculous — Trump University in Donald City.

[Dissenter]

I, for one, am happy to be spared of unsolicited political commentary on this blog. I thought the entry was informative, and expat academics rarely have any insight on the politics of the country where they live that one can’t learn from a Wikipedia entry. Anyone who considers moving to a foreign country will likely brush up on the place and can decide for themselves whether the country’s political system is something they can make peace with.

[Vladimir Krstic]

I apologize for not discussing the political situation in Kazakhstan but (1) I thought that this was not relevant since it does not affect expats and this blog is principally designed for people looking for jobs in KZ and (2) I actually cannot tell you much more than what you can find out yourself. This is indeed a hybrid regime (an authoritarian system that ‘looks like’ democracy) but I am not sure that there is a significant lack of freedoms here. In fact, this seems like a well-functioning society; speaking from a position of a person who speaks Russian and has close connections with many ‘locals.’ I, for example, feel as safe as here I felt in New Zealand, much safer than how I felt in the USA – and I am not trying to be mean; I am just being honest. I regularly leave my stuff when I am in a coffee shop to go to use the restroom, and other people do this as well. And, to my knowledge, we haven’t had any real violence in the streets or a serious case of police brutality ever since I came here two years ago (I don’t follow government-owned media but independent sources). There are protests and demonstrations here and there but not violent. And the country is dealing with the Covid pandemic brilliantly.

Corruption in Kazakh society is, more or less, a normal thing but none of this applies to our university (in fact, this is why Ethics is a mandatory course for all of our students!). I have clearly said in the text that acceptance is merit-based. Let me stress that here: acceptance at NU is strictly merit-based, period!! We will accept any gifted student, regardless of their religion, skin colour, hairstyle, sexual orientation (people don’t look favourably here on this but I am unaware of any incidents, and I read local newspapers regularly), political views (many of the students are critical of the government), social or financial status (we have a very high number of intellectually gifted children from extremely poor families), or any other characteristic. As a member of this and last year’s admission committees, I can personally guarantee that this is true. Children of wealthy or influential people can enrol but, if they are not good enough, they will pay for their education. And if they do not study, they will fail. At NU, we are principally interested in knowledge transfer. We are here to teach. And this is the main reason I accepted my position at this university (thank you God for this decision).

This is not Trump University in Donald City. This analogy is mean and misleading. This is Washington University in Washington (state) or Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Carnegie Mellon University, Lincoln University, to name a few. Nur-Sultan Nazarbayev, notwithstanding his flaws, has managed to secure independence and relative prosperity for Kazakhstan while not shedding an ounce of blood and while keeping great relationships with all neighbouring countries. As a person coming from Former Yugoslavia, I assure you that this is an amazing achievement. Nazarbayev is, in a sense, a father of this nation (perhaps, they could have had a better one but this is beside the point here) and its first president. If Washington or Lincoln can have universities named after them, perhaps Nazarbayev can have one as well. Nazarbayev is also the founder and a patron of this university and so it carries his name. There is nothing strange or ‘Donaldish’ about it (though I did subtly hint in the text that they could have gone for a better name, for practical reasons mainly).
I hope that this resolves all concerns that may arise. I am happy to reply to any other questions. Just flick me an email.

[Daniel Weltman]

Please note that Washington University is in Missouri, not Washington state as you suggest, Vladimir. Only the University of Washington and Washington State University are in Washington state. There's also Washington & Lee University, which is in neither Washington state nor Missouri, and George Washington University, which happens to be in Washington, D.C. So, Americans at least are perhaps not in a position to complain about this sort of naming scheme.

While we're at it, I'm writing this from the Rajiv Gandhi Education City in India, which I arrived at having flown into the country a few years ago via the Indira Gandhi International Airport and then having driven north past the Rajiv Gandhi Sports Complex and the Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women. I am not sure that Kazakhstan deserves to be singled out when it comes to the name conversation!

[Helen De Cruz]

I also want to gently remind commenters (many of whom reside in countries that have great freedom of speech) that we have to be delicate and careful with political commentary, specifically on some countries/places. I've had difficulties soliciting posts for some countries because even a carefully worded post could have unforeseen consequences. We want to put the safety and wellbeing of our authors first! They offer us a valuable sense of what it's like to live and work as a philosopher in a given country, we don't intend to give an evenhanded report on the local political complexities.