- It's a rare oasis of academic excellence in Pakistan and its faculty attracts the country's best and brightest from abroad
- Has been in the forefront of the democracy movement over the past year
- LUMS's elite status is akin to that of the IIMs in India, but its courses include law, political science and the humanities
- It has close links with many Indian universities and often invites Indian scholars for seminars
- A spanking new building for science and engineering is coming up. Its alumni are in top spots around the world.
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Manasa, 22, is the only Indian faculty
A thin slice of Pakistan shining? Sure. Leaving the old streets of Lahore and entering LUMS is like getting a glimpse of 21st century Pakistan with an easy co-existence of tradition and modernity. Girls in hijab walk beside girls smoking cigarettes with no noticeable awkwardness. Pony-tailed men rush to class just behind the more desi ones, discussing projects and presentations. A relaxed atmosphere prevails and coffee-table discussions abound. "We don't have the infrastructure for democracy," says a young student. Another counters, "But something is changing. I feel optimistic and I hope the judiciary gets restored."
Arguably one of the best institutions in Pakistan today, LUMS was set up in 1986 after industrialist Syed Babar Ali decided it was time to address the crying need for a world-class school to improve the quality of business education. The courses have grown to include philosophy and a spanking new building for science and engineering is coming up. Students have increased from 40 to over 2,300 and LUMS alumni are in top spots around the world.
But it is the dedication of the young faculty members that makes the institution what it is. Take Reehana Raza who grew up abroad but has come back to teach economics at LUMS, lured by the same excitement of a society in motion. "I'm a development economist. Where else should I be? I have connections with this place, its history, its politics," she says. After getting her PhD from Cambridge, Raza worked as a consultant for the World Bank and the UN but when her old friends talked of returning, she didn't think twice. "We were a group and our politics agreed." As an economist, she feels India and Pakistan should trade more. "We could benefit from India's growth and as the pie gets bigger, you could fight terrorism better," Raza says. "Some of the best academics in my field are Indians but a sense of 'otherness' has been created. Those of us who have lived abroad have overcome it."
Indeed, the youngest teacher at LUMS is 22-year-old Indian econometrist Manasa Patnam, who met this liberal group of Pakistanis at Oxford and was invited to join. Some tough visa moments later, Patnam arrived and fit right in. "I feel I've seen the country transform. My first impressions were that Pakistanis are so passive and don't really care. But after the recent events (lawyers' strike, suspension of the chief justice, clampdown), the stereotype I had was gone," she says. "These are really interesting times to live in Pakistan.... There is more hope now and I feel as happy as everyone else about these elections."
The success of the LUMS experiment can and should be replicated by decision-makers to fill the institutional void that has grown with botched political experiments of past and present generals. The winds of change blowing through Pakistan would then gather force.
