06/02/2026
The year of the Rectorate.
On managing change.
A year ago, I took responsibility for the university. At that moment my life was filled with projects, dynamics, freedom of choice. I sincerely thought that returning to academia is a matter of the distant future if it ever happens.
But life, as it often happens, had its own scenario.
I accepted the mission of the Chancellor of Ala-Too International University not as a career step, but as an inner consent to take responsibility in difficult times.
This year has not been just a management experience for me. He became a personal practice of managing change not in theory and strategic documents, but in the real, real system of the university.
With its complexity and momentum, with expectations and resistance, with human fatigue and hopes, with the high price of each decision.
Change management often looks simple: make a decision, initiate a reform, change the structure or people. In reality, everything is much more complicated and thinner. Change is always working with the deeper causes of problems, with interests and fears, with the culture of the organization, institutional memory and human emotions.
The same management tool in different organizations produces completely different results. Universal recipes don't exist here and perhaps this is the main thing to accept.
This year has taught me the main thing, patience. Non-passivity and non-conformity with negativity. Patience has turned out to be a different quality. The ability to maintain inner stability where circumstances resist it, to reach your goal when the path becomes longer and more difficult than it seemed at the beginning, to keep faith in people even when there is too much fatigue, doubt, and disappointments around, to make decisions without applause and to remain true to your principles.
In our national context, change management is particularly sensitive. We are well familiar with the practice of "resetting", when with the arrival of new leadership, everything is previously declared erroneous or obsolete. This approach destroys processes, erases institutional memory and demotivates people.
I see clearly from my rector practice: the hardest thing about change is not to invent something new, but not to destroy something that already creates value. And at the same time have the courage to radically change what has really ceased to respond to the challenges of time.
This year, there has been more clarity, clearer boundaries of responsibility, a more honest understanding of where we are and where we want to go.
We are gradually moving away from the inertial system and forming a strategy based on a simple but principled guideline: university for students.
I am sincerely grateful to the team for endurance, professionalism and internal inclusion. For the willingness to stay in the process, even when it's not easy. For the ability to work not according to instructions, but according to sense.
A difficult, but really interesting stage is ahead.
The work continues in progress.
The road will be treaded by the walker.
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