Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

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 taug
ht 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

  With dismal pay and working conditions, the teachers and administrative staff were ready to celebrate almost any occasion. Two or three times a month, they gathered in the common room to mark a public, university, or family occasion. There were snacks—manti, samsa, horsemeat, fresh fruit, dried apricots (kuragi), raisins, pistachios, almonds, cakes, candy, fruit juice, and tea. And a series of toasts to the faculty, the university, Krygyzstan’s independence, better times ahead, friendship, peace in the world and, occasionally, to President Clinton (but not Russian president Yeltsin). In another vestige of Soviet culture in a nominally Islamic country, alcohol was always available. No social function at a university was complete without a few bottles on the table, but consumption was modest, and I never saw anyone get drunk. The toasts came at fifteen- to twenty-minute intervals with the oldest men toasting first. Foreigners came next, and, although I always feigned surprise at being invited to toast, I learned to anticipate when my turn would come. My first toasts were in English, but over the year I learned enough Russian phrases to do a reasonably intelligible toast, albeit with mangled syntax and incorrect word endings.

  Although social occasions were planned, I rarely had advance warning. I politely asked if I could have more than ten minutes’ notice. From that time on, the studio engineer, Kochkun, took it upon himself to keep me informed. He would come up to me in the corridor or pop his head around the classroom door. “Budet chai [there will be tea],” he said, with a broad wink. Chai, of course, was the code for vodka.

  The President’s Bathroom

  The most eagerly anticipated event of the academic year was the visit of President Akayev to the journalism faculty. The reason for the visit was never entirely clear to me, but I was told I had a key role. I was to show the president the new radio production studio built and equipped with UNESCO funds, and explain how radio could build civil society and the market economy. In Kyrgyzstan in the 1990s, there was a good argument to be made for radio as a mass medium, given the scattered population, the mountainous terrain, difficulties of newspaper distribution, and the high cost of TV transmission. Whether it could change society was more debatable, but as an academic I knew I could come up with something that sounded plausible, even if there was no research to support it.

  Preparations for the visit began weeks earlier with a work crew fixing the holes in the walls, painting the classrooms and installing red carpet along the corridor. Office furniture and equipment were purchased, drapes hung, and new signs installed on the doors. Even the metal safes got a new coat of paint, although they looked more authentic in the old Soviet battleship gray. Most important, the crew rebuilt the men’s bathroom, replacing broken toilets, urinals, and sinks, fixing the leaky plumbing and applying a fresh coat of paint. The odds of Akayev popping in for a pee during his short visit were pretty low, but I didn’t complain. If it took a presidential visit to fix up the bathroom, all the male teachers would benefit.

  Agitated administrators hurried hither and thither, locking and unlocking doors. A detailed, minute-by-minute schedule was issued. The day before the visit, everyone was summoned for a dress rehearsal. The rector’s staff went from room to room, timing the prepared speeches of teachers and staff, and ordering cuts to keep the visit on schedule. On the day, nothing went to plan. Akayev lingered in one room, chatting with teachers. He walked right past another room where a group had gathered to brief him on the curriculum, but no one was going to tell him where to go.

  I waited in the radio studio, along with one of the president’s bodyguards. Akayev showed up fifteen minutes late, accompanied by the entourage of administrators and deans. In halting Russian, I explained the studio setup and asked Akayev to formally open the facility by pushing up faders on the audio console and hitting record on the tape machine. He asked how I enjoyed teaching on the faculty. I told him what I knew the entourage wanted him to hear and then made my prepared speech about the role of radio in the new Kyrgyzstan. Akayev left, and I went off to commiserate with the group of bypassed teachers. At least I did not have to take part in the charade in the TV studio.
Actually, the faculty did not have a TV studio. What it had was a recently redecorated and carpeted room, with a control booth, ancient studio lights (most without bulbs), and an old Soviet lighting board that took up half of one wall. UNESCO had approved a grant for studio equipment, but the money was not to be released for several months, and the gear would not arrive before summer. Unfortunately, someone had told Akayev’s staff that the faculty had a TV studio. Appearances had to be maintained, so they borrowed TV equipment from another facility for the day. It would have made more sense to brief the president about what the faculty needed, rather than show him equipment it didn’t have, but it was all about appearances.

  As far as I know, Akayev never used the bathroom. Everyone seemed happy the visit had gone off without incident. The rector apparently promised everyone on the journalism faculty a pay bonus. We were summoned to the common room. “Budet chai,” said Kochkun, with a larger-than-usual wink.

  There’s No Money in Poetry

  For most of my students, the novelty of having their first Western teacher was enough. It didn’t matter what I was teaching. They said they liked my interactive style, a contrast to the chitat’ leksii method. Still, in my first semester, I was disappointed that third- and fourth-year students seemed to know so little about media and journalism. What on earth had they been studying the first two years?

  Students learning English liked to chat with me in the corridor on class breaks, and the mystery was solved when one of them plucked up the courage to ask me a direct question: “When are you going to teach my journalism group?”

  I was puzzled. “I thought I was teaching the journalism group,” I replied. “No, the university decided you should teach the literature group,” he said. “They all want to be poets.”

  Anisa said she understood my concerns but there was nothing she could do about it. The decision, like so many others, had been made na verkhu (above). I asked for an appointment with the rector, who was presumably as “above” as it goes. His secretary said that he did not take appointments. I gave up, and resolved to do what I could to turn budding poets into journalists. I doubt I had much success. I certainly could not use the “There’s no money in poetry” argument, because everyone knew there wasn’t much money in journalism either.