An on-the-ground report from Myanmar in today’s issue of Science paints a bleak portrait of the higher-education system in the country formerly known as Burma. The University of Rangoon (now Yangon), the country’s flagship higher-education institution, has been closed to undergraduates since a student uprising in 1988 (The Chronicle, June 7, 2002). University labs “are like ghost towns,” and academics are virtually shut off from the outside world. “The tragedy is that the country is further behind than it was in the 1950s,” says one Western diplomat. The military government asserts that it has built 156 universities and colleges since 1988, but skeptics aren’t buying the claim. Than Shwe, the junta’s leader, “is living in a fantasy world,” says the diplomat. —Beth McMurtrie