“Most of my relatives were bus conductors, and I wanted to be a bus driver because I was ambitious,” recalled Waqar Ahmad of his Glasgow childhood in the early 1970s.

As it happened, Ahmad’s career went in a very different direction, reaching what seems likely to be his final professional stop behind the wheel of central Asia’s leading university. And that same ambition still drives him forward as he seeks global recognition and a leading role in the economic development of Kazakhstan for an institution that is still only in its mid-teens but this month entered the top 500 of the ����Vlog World University Rankings for the first time.

Ahmad became president of Nazarbayev University in June last year, called out of a retirement spent tending to a Windsor allotment to head a campus that has grown to around 7,000 students and more than 500 faculty. He was attracted by the prospect of working in a young country that was “not dealt a particularly good hand” during decades of Soviet rule marked by nuclear tests and irrigation projects that dried up much of the Aral Sea, he told ����Vlog.

On gaining independence in 1991, Kazakhstan put significant faith in the power of higher education to drive its development. This culminated in the founding of the flagship, English-speaking Nazarbayev University in 2010 by the country’s eponymous national president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, with the support of global partner institutions, including the National University of Singapore, the UK’s University of Cambridge and UCL, and the US universities of Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh and Wisconsin-Madison, plus Duke University. Teaching is delivered in English.

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Nazarbayev University

“I had tremendous regard for this institution,” Ahmad said. “Also, when I started looking at it, I felt that I could do something with it. It’s achieved a lot in its 15-year life, but it could have achieved more. The focus wasn’t as sharp towards the last few years as it might have been.”

Ahmad, who was chancellor of Abu Dhabi University for nearly six years before his first attempt at retirement in 2023, described his new employer as an institution of “outstanding” strengths but also areas of weakness. Accordingly, he is focused on achieving “high quality consistently” across Nazarbayev’s activities, including by setting clearer targets for research output, securing accreditations for key programmes, and pushing the uptake of teaching credentials among academic staff.

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“I think some people find it uncomfortable,” said Ahmad, of internal responses to his arrival among staff, approximately seven in 10 of whom are from outside Kazakhstan. “Some have not been challenged or some have been told, ‘You’re doing a good job,’ and [then] somebody new comes in and says [pointing at university rankings], ‘Well, actually we’re here [but] we want to be there: this is the kind of competition we respect, and if we want to catch up with them, we need to do things differently.’”

Nevertheless, Ahmad’s perception is that the “majority” of staff are “excited about the future that we are presenting to them”. And he is also attracting senior academics from overseas to join him in Kazakhstan, including new provost Rehan Sadiq, previously provost and vice-president (academic) of the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, and Bjorn Birgisson, currently chair of the School of Environmental, Civil, Agricultural and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Georgia, who will become vice-provost for research in January.

At stake is not just the development of Nazarbayev University, but of Kazakhstan’s wider higher education sector, with the institution running master’s and executive education programmes for leaders from the country’s other higher education providers.

Indeed, as Kazakhstan’s flagship university, Nazarbayev’s success “is also crucial to the nation’s ambition to be recognised as a modern knowledge economy”, said Ahmad, flagging recent achievements including the development of a Kazakh-language large language model, KAZ-LLM.

“We do need to make sure that people recognise us as a world-class institution. We do need to go up in rankings and we do need to make sure that we have prestigious accreditations and so on,” said Ahmad. “But at the same time, it’s not a game. This is a serious process; the university carries the hopes and aspirations of a country. We are absolutely committed to make sure that whatever we do is relevant.”

Kazakhstan’s global reputation was hurt by the discontent that led to the resignation of President Nazarbayev in 2019 and the violent crackdown on 2022 fuel protests overseen by his successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, thought to have led to 227 deaths and nearly 10,000 arrests.

On the question of the university being named after a now-ousted president, Ahmad stated that any concerns were ameliorated by wide public recognition that the university “needs to be invested in and it needs to be protected”. It receives significant public funding via domestic students, who represent the significant majority of its enrolment, and it also funds its activities via its own endowment.

As for Kazakhstan’s human rights record, while some Western academics might criticise it, that “moral high horse” was “lame, if not dead”.

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“Look at what’s happening in the UK at the moment, where public debate has been stifled, where you can’t go and demonstrate about something, where peaceful direct action has been outlawed,” said Ahmad, speaking after the arrests of protesters expressing support for Palestine Action, a proscribed group under terrorism legislation.

“As a university, we have institutional autonomy enshrined in law, and we have academic freedom enshrined in law. And I can tell you, hand on heart, that in the 14 months [I have spent at Nazarbayev] nobody has called me to say, ‘You can’t do this.’ Nobody has called me to say, ‘I’m the minister of so and so, and my son or daughter has applied: make sure they get a place,’ and so on.

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“So, people take academic freedom and institutional autonomy extremely seriously and we protect it as best as we can.”

Ahmad’s irritation at what he perceives as Western condescension towards Kazakhstan extends to UK universities’ approach to partnering with Nazarbayev. Although the university retains many international ties – next year it is launching joint programmes with SOAS University of London and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) – discussions with two Russell Group institutions were “hierarchical” and swiftly stalled.

“British universities, in particular, need to get rid of this colonial, ‘I’m superior’ attitude,” Ahmad said. “If they don’t, they’re going to fall flat on their nose and break their teeth, because there’s no shortage of partners for universities like mine.”

Some Western universities have opened branch campuses in Kazakhstan, including, from the UK, Cardiff, Coventry and De Montfort universities. Ahmad said that transnational education would add welcome capacity to the Kazakh sector and that he would be happy to collaborate with such partners where appropriate. However, he is concerned about the broader recent revival of Western universities’ appetite to build branch campuses, catalysed by India’s opening up and growing immigration restrictions in their home countries – although he does not think that these worries apply to institutions operating in Kazakhstan.

“The history of transnational partnerships is not a very happy one and not a very credible one. A lot of those partnerships are historically exploitative [and] extractive. It’s not in the interest of the senior partner to see the junior partner develop because, if they do develop, you can’t extract any more,” Ahmad said. And he worries that “a lot of British universities that have no history of setting up campuses outside the country all of a sudden [branch campuses] as the salvation” for financial problems caused by dwindling international enrolments.

“They need to be very careful, if they’re getting into a partnership, to make it a genuine partnership, make it a lasting partnership,” he said. “And you’re not going to have a lasting partnership unless you really respect your partners.”

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Stringer/AFP via Getty Images

If Ahmad comes across as being a bit spiky towards parts of the Western educational establishment, that might to some extent reflect his against-the-odds rise to university leadership, stretching back to that Glasgow childhood marked by racism and a series of “failing” schools, the last of which Ahmad left aged 16. He then spent a decade in menial jobs but read voraciously and, in 1984, signed up to an Open University degree – which he completed at full-time pace while working six days a week in restaurants.

This led to a PhD and a lectureship at the University of Bradford, followed by the establishment of a stream of work on ethnicity and social policy in the University of York’s Social Policy Research Unit, and then a professorship at the University of Leeds. Ahmad also spent three years as chief social scientist in John Prescott’s Office of the Deputy Prime Minister during the Blair years but opted to leave when he tired of ministers “who were using [the proclaimed need to conduct] research as a means of not doing anything”.

In 2004, Ahmad moved on to Middlesex University as pro vice-chancellor and then deputy vice-chancellor, before departing in 2017 for Abu Dhabi University, which rose rapidly up the THE rankings under his tenure, now hovering on the brink of the top 200.

Reflecting on his career, Ahmad said: “[There are] lots of people like me, who throughout their lives have been told ‘You can’t do this’ and ‘You can’t do that’. So I’m driven, and I like a challenge, and I don’t like people telling me that I can’t do something.”

Accordingly, he is not interested in scepticism about whether a fledgling university in central Asia can be a global player.

“I can absolutely guarantee that [Nazarbayev University] will be in the top 300 in the next three to four years,” he said. “And we will do it by sorting out substance – there won’t be any games played. And by doing it we’ll make this a stronger institution, we’ll make it a more relevant institution, and we will follow both the prestige and the purpose and make it an institution that the country is proud of.”

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chris.havergal@timeshighereducation.com