Those who fail either don't get a job or are first out the door when cutbacks hit. Science has been particularly badly hit. Undergraduates have first to pass an exam on the works of Karimov before being allowed to defend their dissertation or sit their other exams. A paper fails unless it contains quotes from Karimov. Officials from the presidency conduct the exams, not academics.
Pluralism is now out of the question in Uzbekistan.
Science is especially persecuted and resembles more and more the one-sided, conservative discipline it became in Soviet times. May 14 ore than 100 years ago rare artefacts worth a fortune were discovered by the banks of the River Oxus in Central Asia. Now a group of miners backed by blue-chip UK investors is hoping to uncover another fortune in the area, this time in gold. Oxus Mining, which is floating on the Alternative Investment Market next month, is raising 10m to finance recovery of gold from the barren tracts of Amantaytau. Exploration veterans Roger Turner and Richard Wilkins launched Oxus from a pub in Knightsbridge in 1996.