Higher educational practices in post-Soviet Central Asia remain predicated on an authoritarian conception of expertise rooted in an objective and universal science. While the substance of such education has changed since the Soviet era, the form of education remains rooted in Soviet-era discursive ideological practices, practices that encourage civic passivity outside the classroom. The liberal arts model of higher education represents a significant challenge to prevailing education norms, but it is a model that is honoured more in name than in implementation by domestic and international reformers. The inability to articulate the broader societal significance of the liberal arts suggests a broader act of forgetting the civic inspiration of liberal education in established as well as developing democracies.