Universities come to life

Once a hotbed of political subversion, the old foundations of the Rangoon Student Union now sustain a grove of trees that sway sleepily in regimental rows. Half a century and a name-change later, the leafy avenues of Yangon University are crawling with the first crop of undergraduates to study a curriculum free from the interfering hand of the military, reports Aljazeera.

Until recently the word ‘poverty’ was banned, alongside any discussion of domestic politics at the university. After an outburst of student-led protests in 1988, the political science department was shuttered. Further protests 10 years later led to the shut-down of all undergraduate teaching, but things are now changing. "We have full autonomy," says a beaming Kyaw Naing, a rector at the school, two weeks after the university re-opened its gates to undergraduates in December.

A government largely composed of retired generals took power in 2011 and, to the surprise of many outsiders, began a radical political and economic reform programme they called a transition to ‘disciplined democracy’. Even so, decades of Western isolation and a vandalised education system will make it difficult to execute the government's democratic rebranding.
Full report on the Aljazeera site