St. John's News

A free press may be something Americans take for granted, but journalism students in the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan were unfamiliar with how it operates, says Professor Roger Wetherington, Journalism Program Director in the College of Professional Studies at St. John’s University. He was a visiting Fulbright Scholar last year at the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Research, which is part of KIMEP, a 3,000-student, English-language university in the commercial capital of Almaty. Encouraged to go to Kazakhstan by his St. John’s colleague, Professor Jay Nathan of The Peter J. Tobin College of Business, who has been there twice as a Fulbright Scholar, Professor Wetherington spent a sabbatical year there, believing that he could make a difference.

And he did. After teaching 60 undergraduate and master’s degree students in journalism, and lecturing in the community, he received an award from KIMEP for his efforts on behalf of freedom of the press in Kazakhstan. He not only revamped the university’s journalism curriculum, he helped transform the school newspaper from a newsletter to “a pretty professional weekly or biweekly KIMEP Times.” 

“We covered the fall of the government of neighboring Kyrgyzstan,” he says. “Two of my students were in the capital [Bishkek]—one as a reporter for Agence France Presse. Not many university newspapers get stories from their own foreign correspondents. Kyrgyz students at KIMEP also produced a story about local reaction.”

Professor Wetherington found that his knowledge of Russian was helpful in managing throughout the year in the ethnically mixed, but overwhelmingly Muslim “of a very relaxed kind” country, although he taught his journalism courses in English. He had also been to the former Soviet Union several times, but not to Kazakhstan.

“The media in Kazakhstan aren’t self-supporting,” he says. “They depend on the government to print their newspapers and provide financial support. It’s difficult for the people to criticize the government [in this former Soviet republic] if they don’t have an independent press. I knew that the Communist era was over, but I didn’t realize before I went how ingrained Communist ways were in their society. We’re talking about 70 years of Communist indoctrination!

“Non-Western concepts of single-party rule remain strong,” he explains, and he’s concerned that since his return to the U.S., the Kazakhstan government is cracking down on the various nongovernmental organizations (Soros Foundation, Eurasia Foundation and others) that are trying to nurture democracy.

He Revamps the Curriculum
“The first thing I did [as a professor there] was to revamp the journalism curriculum,” he says, about the three-year old program. “I made the writing courses required. Some of the students slowed us down with their command of English, but others would be ‘A’ students anywhere.”

His most serious problem there was a lack of journalism books at KIMEP. “I arranged over the year to send just about all the books I had in my office—textbooks, journals and reference books—including about 20 copies of the Associated Press Stylebook. I was able to donate my books only because Fulbrighters are allowed to send books through the U.S. Embassy. I left all these books to KIMEP when I left, and they formed the core of a good library for faculty and students.”

The other thing Professor Wetherington did in Kazakhstan was to learn how to hitch a ride. “Private citizens would stop and take you where you wanted to go in their cars for a few dollars.” He described Almaty, a city with a population of one million, as “a beautiful city with lovely parks and architecture,” but adds that “I was never so cold in my life, even though I was at least hundreds of miles south of Russia, including Siberia. In January, I got frostbite on both hands because I continued to dress as I do here. I gained a new respect for hats and gloves.”

A professor of journalism at St. John’s since 1990, Professor Wetherington has been an assistant city editor at the Daily News and a copy-editor at The New York Times.