by Pervez Hoodbhoy,
Dawn,
Jan 2 and 12.
General Pervez Musharraf's
regime boasts of its successes in science and education at home and abroad.
Recently, I saw
The claims made were several. A 300 percent jump in research publications shows
that academic activity in Pakistan has vastly increased; nine new engineering
universities with European teaching faculty will soon be established; the 3000
Pakistani students sent overseas for higher degrees will revolutionize the
university system upon return; Ph.Ds produced
annually from Pakistani universities will soon approach the spectacular figure
of 1500; mathematics is now a strong discipline in Pakistan; and so forth.
The truth is very different. Even though the spending on higher education has
increased 15 times over the last five years, the improvements have been
cosmetic. Genuine science in
miserably backward by international standards. Its real problems are yet to be
touched.
Take the HEC's first claim: the 3-fold increase in
Pakistani academic publications. Fantastically large per-paper monetary rewards
to university teachers, a practice not adopted anywhere else in the world for
excellent reasons, have indeed boosted publication rates. But publishing more
papers is not the same as doing more research. Instead, the high rewards have
caused an explosion of plagiarism, theft of intellectual property, publication
of trivial results and falsified data, and publication of slightly different
versions of the same paper in different journals. Most published papers are
worthless academically and scientifically.
The reader can readily verify the last point. All that is needed is a computer
and an internet connection. Simply type www.scholar.google.com into your browser, and then the name of any
individual scientist or scholar you want. (Academic databases even more
comprehensive than Google are available but not free.) A list of publications
of that person, together with a count of the number of times his/her papers
have been cited by other scholars, will be displayed. Remember that a piece of
scientific work is important only if it is useful to other scientists, or to
industry in the form of patents that lead to new products (a separate database
exists for that). So, in a matter of seconds, one can see which individuals are
considered important by the world of science and academia.
The results of such database searches
are eye-opening. A majority of papers by Pakistani authors, even if published
in international journals by some hook or crook, have exactly zero citations
(once self-citations are removed). Such papers have contributed nothing. They
may just as well have not been written. The average number of citations per
Pakistani paper is 3.41 (includes self-citation), which is much below that in
scientifically advanced countries.
Still more shocking is the citation
record of some of
Now for the HEC's nine Pak-European universities
project: This is a stunning disaster. The most advanced university (in terms of
construction and
planning) was the French engineering university in
explanation for why this did not happen, no new date has been set, and no
account given of the money already spent.
On the face of it, making Pak-European universities sounds like a wonderful idea.
Even commonsense said that the project could not work. Perhaps one can persuade
beefy mercenaries of the French Foreign Legion to go to some country where
suicide bombings happen daily and killing of ordinary citizens by terrorists is
routine. But it takes an enormous leap of faith to think that respectable
academics from
A wiser leadership would have aimed for one properly planned new engineering
university, set up under the European Union. It would have sought external help
for adding engineering departments to existing universities, as well as to
massively upgrade existing ones. But these relatively modest goals are
unacceptable to the present HEC leadership that believes, like the Musharraf regime as a whole, in grand plans rather than
practical, feasible, reforms.
Showing the hollowness of the other official claims of progress would take more
space than available here. Slick PowerPoint presentations by HEC officials
throw one figure after another at dizzying speed giving the impression of
fantastic progress. But the intelligent listener must ask many questions: does
it make sense to select thousands of students on the basis of a substandard
high-school level numeracy and literacy test, and
then send them for an expensive graduate-level education in
It is time to end the fetish of buying tons of expensive scientific equipment
that, at the end of it all, produce only zero-citation papers and zero patents.
Curiously, after a bunch of projects were exposed as phony, the HEC broke with
its past practice and now no longer puts on its
website details of HEC-funded projects. It is also time to stop HEC officials
and HEC delegates from gallivanting across the globe at public expense on the
vaguest of excuses for "fact-finding" missions and conferences.
There must be an independent investigation of the HEC's
plans and financing, a review of its programs, and a full audit of accounts.
The inquiry should be jointly done by the future government through the PAC and
NAB, assisted by a citizens committee. Individual whims and personal ambitions
must be checked to protect the national interest.
WHAT REAL REFORM REQUIRES: The record-setting increase in the budget for higher
education - which shot up from Rs 3.8 billion in 2002
to Rs 33.7 billion in 2007 - has led to little beyond
cosmetic changes. So, what can be done?
Solutions are needed at three distinct levels - determining correct funding
priorities, implementing approved plans and projects responsibly, and, most
importantly, inducing changes in values to promote and enable real learning.
Current spending priorities are the haphazard expression of individual whims,
not actual needs. For example, most Pakistani students in higher education
(about 0.8 million) study in about 700 colleges. These colleges receive
pitifully small funding compared to universities. During 2001-2004, the funds
annually allocated to colleges averaged a miserable sum of Rs
0.48 billion and the spending per college student was only one sixth that for a
university student. Subsequently this has become worse. It is no surprise then that public colleges
are in desperate shape with dilapidated buildings, broken furniture, and
laboratory and library facilities that exist only in name.
Meanwhile, many public universities are awash in funds. They have gone on a
shopping binge for all kinds of gadgetry - fax machines, fancy multimedia
projectors, and electricity-guzzling airconditioners.
But it would be hard to argue that any of this has served to improve teaching
quality even marginally. Worse, the availability of "free money" has
led to the pursuit of numerous madcap projects such as the HEC's
hugely expensive, but failed, attempt to bring in hundreds of fearful European
university professors to teach in a country where suicide bombers kill at will.
The beggarly treatment of colleges compared to universities is often justified
on grounds that universities perform research while colleges do not. But,
notwithstanding a few honorable exceptions, this "research" has added
little to the stock of existing knowledge as judged by the
international community of scholars. Nevertheless, in 2005/2006
university research funding totaled a whopping Rs
0.342 billion. Past experience shows that much of the money will be used to buy
expensive research equipment that will find little if any real use.
Instead of continuing to pay for dubious research, funding priorities must
shift to improving teaching quality, especially in colleges. Pakistani
university and college students, as well as their teachers, are far below the
internationally accepted levels in terms of basic subject understanding. As one
indicator, performance scores of Pakistanis on the US Graduate Record
Examinations, which test subject basics, are miserably poor compared to
students from
Because bad teaching quality largely comes from having teachers with
insufficient knowledge of their subject, it is important both to have better
teacher selection mechanisms and to create large-scale teacher-training academies
in every province. Established with international help, these academies should
bring in the best teachers as trainers from across the country and from our neighbours. It is hard to see any trainers coming from
western countries, although one should try to get them. This effort will cost
money and take time - perhaps on the order of a billion dollars over 5 years.
These high-quality institutions should have a clear philosophy aimed at
equipping teachers to teach through concepts rather than rote learning, use
modern textbooks, and emphasize basic principles of pedagogy, grading, and
fairness. They should award degrees to create an incentive for teachers to go
there and to do well.
Until a sufficiently large number of adequate university teachers can be generated
by the above (and various other) means, the senseless policy of making new
universities must be discontinued. The HEC prides itself in almost doubling the
number of public universities over 6 years. But there is nothing to be gained
from a department of English where the department's head cannot speak or
write a grammatically correct non-trivial sentence of English; a physics
department where the head is confused about the operation of an incandescent
light bulb; a mathematics department where graduate students have problems with
elementary surds and roots; or a biology department where evolution is thought
to be new-fangled and quite unnecessary to teach as part of modern biology.
Better academic planning and management at the national level - which has no
monetary cost - is crucial to having higher education institutions that
actually function. Major quality improvements could result from using
nation-wide standardized tests for student admission into higher education
institutions; teaching teachers to use distance-learning materials effectively;
and designing standardized teaching laboratories that may be efficiently
duplicated across
But implementation of even the best plans comes to naught without good
management at the institutional level. Good leaders have made a difference in
their respective institutions. Unfortunately,
DEEPER ISSUES: Sixty years of consistent
failure force us to search for reasons that go beyond fiscal and administrative
issues. What sets us apart from the developed world, or even
In seeking change, it will be important to break the tyranny of the teacher, a
relic of pre-modern social values. Closed minds cannot innovate, create art and
literature, or do science. Most Pakistani students memorize an arbitrary set of
rules and an endless number of facts and say that X is true and Y is false
because that’s what the textbook says. (I grind my teeth whenever a master's or
Ph.D student in my university class gives me this
argument!)
There has to be social acceptance of modern education which, at its
fundamentals, is entirely about individual liberty, willingness to accept
change, intellectual honesty, and constructive rebellion. Critical thought
allows individuals to make a revolutionary difference and to reinvent the
future. Else they will merely repeat the dysfunction of the past.
To open minds, the change must begin at the school level. Good pedagogy
requires encouraging the spirit of healthy questioning in the classroom. It
should therefore be normal practice for teachers to raise such questions as:
How do we know? What is important to measure? How to check the correctness of
measurements? What is the evidence? How to make sense out of your results? Is
there a counter explanation, or perhaps a simpler one? The aim should be to get
students into the habit of posing such critical questions and framing reasoned
answers.
Reforming higher education in
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HEC SPOKESPERSON (10 Jan, 2008):
This is with reference to the article
"Sham university reforms" by Pervez Hoodboy
(Jan 2). Since its formation in 2002, the Higher Education Commission has made
remarkable progress, implementing the much needed reforms. These include:
setting of stringent requirements for the appointment and promotion of faculty
members, strict quality control of PhD programmes, establishment of a digital library providing free access to
23,000 international journals to all public sector universities.
It has also introduced an e-books programme so that every public sector university now has
access to 45,000 textbooks from 220 international publishers, has initiated a programme of live lectures from technologically advanced
countries through video conferencing in real time and with full inter-activity.
Moreover, changes in the salary structure of academics under the tenure track
system have been made through which salaries of scholars active in research
have been increased significantly. Most
universities in
adopted this system. Introduction of a foreign faculty hiring programme through which the "brain drain" from
These changes have been implemented and
they are changing the landscape of our universities to the benefit of the
nation.
The HEC reforms have been
internationally praised. A WB report says that "these positive reforms already
have benefited the universities". It goes on to state that the "HEC has
placed quality improvement of the higher
education sub-sector at the centre of its agenda" and that
"the programmes
spelled out in the medium-term development framework of the HEC are
an impressive set of initiatives".
Praising the leadership provided by Prof
(Dr) Atta-ur-Rahman within the HEC, it states that "the HEC has
gained authority since its inception in
part because of its own strong and professional leadership,
independent board and ample
funding" and that "still a young institution, the HEC already has a
legacy. Since its inception, it has been startlingly active and has shaken up the world of the
universities".
These reforms were presented at a
meeting of the
The presentations highlighted the
achievements that
His stand is that increase in our
research output has arisen due to "explosion of plagiarism, theft of
intellectual property, publication of
trivial results and falsified data, and
publication of slightly different versions of the same paper in different
journals".
This is wrong. It is the HEC which has
taken firm steps to control and eliminate plagiarism by laying down a clear
policy against it.
By trivialising
more than 1,600 research articles from
Mr Hoodbhoy is also critical of the initiative to establish a
number of new universities of engineering, science and technology. Such
universities take years to plan and implement.
The French-sponsored university
has been deliberately delayed to enable the formation of a strong consortium of
French universities. Calling this delay a "stunning disaster" is
again an example of a typical exaggeration.
He also wrongly says that there has been
extravagant funding of our highereducation sector.
The budget of all 57 public sector universities in
SAMINA WAQAR Director-General (Public
Relations), HEC, Islamabad
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HOODBHOY RESPONDS TO WAQAR (Dawn, 15 Jan
2008)
The HEC has, as expected, responded to
my expose (Dawn, 2 Jan) of its
unconscionable squandering of public
funds by trotting out its usual list
of claimed achievements (Dawn, 10 Jan).
But this spiritless reply does not
address the issues I raised, except
distantly and peripherally. Instead,
it takes refuge in a 2006 World Bank
report, issued by a WB team led by
Benoit Millot,
that lavishes praise upon the HEC for having effected
"quality improvement of the higher
education sub-sector", and for having
revolutionized Pakistans
universities.
I find this fascinating and disturbing.
This is a perfect example where
two institutions are driven by shared
needs -- the WB to lend and the HEC
to spend. While the WB report is printed
on glossy paper, is written in
fine English, and has beautiful
graphics, it is fundamentally flawed
because it contains no meaningful data
on the quality of education in
Pakistani universities. Browsing though
WB publications, I simply did not
see any report that purports to be a
scientifically performed survey on
this specific matter.
When and how, may I ask, did the WB
check the quality of faculty or that
of the student body across Pakistani
universities? Has it surveyed
library and laboratory facilities, the
content of university courses, the
standard of examination papers, the
presence (or lack thereof) of academic
colloquia and seminars on campuses, etc?
Was any assessment made of the
number of days in a year that the
universities actually functioned, the
suitability of those appointed as
vice-chancellors, employer satisfaction
with university graduates, etc? These
are crucial quality indicators.
Unless one has reasonably reliable data
on such matters, the opinions
expressed in the quoted WB report are
simply vacuous.
If the WB has indeed carried out a
relevant survey, I would be most
grateful to know the reference to such
work and apologize in advance for
any hurt caused. On the other hand, if
there is no such work, then I would
like to know what the WBs $1500 per-day education consultants do in a
third-world country beyond cutting and
pasting from official reports. If
other sections of the World Bank operate
similarly, then one fears for
The HEC has picked many numbers that
suit its purposes but has not
attempted to see if they are meaningful.
It is unfortunate that the HEC
spokesperson accuses me of trivializing
all 1600 research papers published
in recent times. I did not. Instead, I
merely showed that the interested
reader -- using the free Google.Scholar data base mentioned in my article
-- can judge each one of these papers to
see if anyone in the world has
found them useful or interesting.
Unfortunately, all but a tiny fraction
have zero citations.
To my mind, publishing even two dozen
papers yearly -- provided they are
highly original and well-cited -- would
have a far healthier impact on our
universities than the hundreds of junk
papers generated by the
government's per-paper reward scheme.
While the spokesperson lamely claims
that "It is the HEC which has taken
firm steps to control and eliminate
plagiarism by laying down a clear policy
against it", no such thing is
evident. On the contrary, newspapers in
stories about Pakistani academics who
freely plagiarize materials across
the globe as they rush to grab the
rewards.
Finally, I do believe that there is an
alternative direction in which to
improve and expand higher education, and
which could gainfully use the
huge sums now allocated to the HEC. For
this, the interested reader is
referred to part-II of my article (Dawn,
12-01-2008).
Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy,
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