Duke partners with Kazakhstan university

Duke University is expanding its global reach through a partnership with Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan.

Duke’s Fuqua School of Business is helping to design Nazarbayev’s MBA program, which is expected to begin in September 2012.

The project, which began in 2009, will help create one of the only universities in Kazakhstan to be run independently of government control.

Valerie Hausman, a Duke administrator who is organizing the partnership, said the university will act as an advisor to Nazarbayev.

“Our relationship with them is more of a consulting relationship,” Hausman said. “This is a fairly unique relationship — this is not a Duke degree or Duke campus.”

In its first year, some of the program’s faculty will likely be from Duke’s business school, Hausman said.

“Ideally in the first year we will begin to work with Nazarbayev to help them source faculty of their own,” she said.

All of the university’s classes are taught in English, according to its website.

Hausman, who is also assistant dean of global business development and executive education at Duke’s business school, said the school has been pursuing a strategy to develop a presence in regions that are growing in economic power since 2008.

Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic, has oil resources. It is also the ninth largest country in the world by area.

“They say that they are looking to be the preeminent university in Central Asia,” Hausman said.

Duke is among several institutions partnering with Nazarbayev to develop its programs.

Blake Naughton, director of the executive doctorate in higher education management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, said the school has been supporting Nazarbayev’s central administration and university leadership.

“It’s not often you get to work with a university starting from scratch,” he said.

“It’s been very fascinating work.”

Naughton said Nazarbayev, which receives funding from Kazakhstan’s government, is building an endowment so it can eventually rely more on its own money, like a private institution.

Allison Adams, spokeswoman for UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, said there is a need for partnerships such as this one.

But the business school is not involved in any similar consulting programs, she said.

The school participates in a number of international degree programs and all of them include exchange programs, she said.

“We admit our students and our teachers teach our students,” she said about the exchange programs.

She said the business school’s OneMBA program is a partnership with several business schools in other countries to deliver a joint degree.

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