The man from Kyrgyzstan
In 1994, Baktybek “Bakyt” Beshimov was the youngest university president in his native Kyrgyzstan when he first visited Harvard. After two awestruck days, Beshimov stood on a bridge over the Charles River and vowed to bring to Osh State University the same academic freedom, opportunity, and ethical scholarship he had witnessed in Cambridge. “I prayed, and I dreamed,” he said. The dream came true, for a while. During the 1990s, in the first blush of post-Soviet reform, Bashimov made Osh a model of openness, with student exchange programs and an international faculty that by 1996 was 11 percent Western. But the brash young educator was eventually fired and put under house arrest by a national regime skeptical of openness. Beshimov remained defiant, and that made him wildly popular in Osh, which elected him to parliament. By 2000, the historian was on his way to India for a five-year tour as Kyrgyzstan’s ambassador. Then came...