Pakistan’s university system is breaking down, perhapsirreparably so. Thanks to the Higher Education Commission’s grand plans for amassive change, a tidal wave of money hit our public universities during theMusharraf years.Although difficult financial times finally stemmed the flood, this enormous cashinfusion served to amplify problems rather than improve teaching and researchquality.
Naked greed is now destroying the moral fibre of academia. Professors across thecountry are clamouring to lift even minimal requirements that could assurequality education. This is happening in two critical ways. First, to benefitfrom three-fold increases in salaries for tenure-track positions, professors arespeedily removing all barriers for their promotions. Second, they want to beable to take on more PhD students, whether these students have the requisiteacademic capacity or not. Having more students translates into proportionatelymore money in each professor’s pocket.
Nowhere is this more evident than at Quaid-i-Azam University, said to bePakistan’s flagship public university. Barely two miles from the presidencyand the prime minister’s secretariat, it was once an island of excellence in ashallow sea of mediocrity. Most other universities started lower, and theirdecay has gone further and faster than at QAU. Some are recognisable asuniversities in name only.
QAU’s departments of physics and economics were especially well known 35 yearsago, which is when I joined the university. The faculty was small and not manyPhD degrees were awarded in those days. Money was scarce, but standards werefairly good and approximated those at a reasonable US university. But as timepassed, less care was taken in appointing new faculty members. Politics began todominate over merit and quality slipped. That slow slippage is now turning intorapid collapse.
Last month, at a formal meeting, QAU professors voted to make life easy forthemselves. The Academic Council, the key decision-making body of theuniversity, decided that henceforth no applicant for a university teachingposition, whether at the associate professor or professor level, could berequired to give an open seminar or lecture as a part of the selection process.Open lectures were deemed by the council as illegal, unjust and a ploy forvictimising teachers.
This is mind-boggling. Public presentations allow an applicant’s subjectcompetence and ability to communicate to be assessed by the academic community.(For the record, this writer insisted that requiring open lectures fromcandidates is standard practice in every decent university in the world. Thisprompted angry demands for his dismissal as chairman of his department!) A secondmajor decision also dealt a stunning blow to the future of QAU. The councilvoted 25-12 that QAU’s PhD candidates did not have to conform to internationalstandards. It decided to overturn its earlier acceptance of the HEC’srequirement that the international GRE subject tests must be passed by acandidate prior to awarding a PhD degree. Some professors gleefully noted thatthe HEC had been mortally weakened by the removal of its chairman, DrAtta-ur-Rahman, and argued that good advantage needed to be taken of this happyfact. Those who wanted international testing were labelled agents of foreignpowers.
This horrible mess comes from a misguided HEC policy that emphasised numbersover all else. The number of PhD students registered at various universities,including QAU, was purposely made to explode. But many PhD students, perhapsbecause of their poor schooling, are not good enough as PhD material. Underpressure to maintain a minimal standard for PhD students, the HEC finallydecreed a pass-mark of 40 percentile in the international GRE subject test.
The GRE test is fairly elementary and pitched only at the Bachelor’s level(i.e. 16 years of education). It has, however, proved to be too difficult formany Pakistani PhD students even at the end of their PhD studies. In spite ofseveral tries, most cannot meet the 40 percentile pass mark, an extremely lowlevel. But it is common for Indian, Chinese and Iranian students to score twiceas much at the beginning of their studies.
Why the urgency for eliminating international testing? This is easilyunderstood. Each professor gets paid a few lakh rupees per PhD produced, with acurrent maximum of 10 students per supervisor at QAU. Lifting the GRErequirement removes a threat to the additional income of their supervisors. Tokeep up appearances, from now on a token internal test will be used instead. Itis hard to imagine that any student will be allowed to fail. While the decisionof the professors to do away with international testing has been greeted withrelief by many enrolled PhD students at QAU, among better students there is asense of foreboding of an endless downward slide.
Many students recognise that international tests are difficult but they alsoknow it is a real measure of what they have learned. Although students in allother departments have reportedly failed, the fact is that even average studentsin the physics department have done reasonably well. Over the last year, a totalof nine students in the physics department have cleared the 40 percentilerequirement. Three students, who the department subsequently honoured, securedover 75 percentile. All students, whether they do well or otherwise, say theylearned a great deal of the subject matter in preparing for this challenge andfelt more educated. The problem is their teachers seem to think the test isimpossibly difficult, or perhaps they are insufficiently equipped to help theirstudents prepare for it.
The involvement of teachers in running QAU’s non-teaching affairs is anotherbad sign. A weak university administration appears unwilling or unable to resistthe growing power of professors who seek personal profit at the expense ofpublic good. There is even resort to violence — some professors had physicallykicked the former registrar, the second-most senior university administrator,out of his office. This action drew no comment from the head of the university.
To be fair, the threat to QAU is not just from inside. The campus contains someof the prime undeveloped public land in the capital. This land is beingencroached upon by surrounding villagers as well as political influential.University administrators, supposedly on behalf of the public interest, plan tosell off bits and pieces of university property to commercial interests. Thesale of a piece of campus land to make a gas station on Murree Road is currentlyunder negotiation. But the university’s land was given to it for educationalpurposes. It rightfully belongs to future generations of Pakistanis.
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Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy is chairman and professor at the department of physics, Quaid-i-AzamUniversity, Islamabad.
