As Pakistan's economy moves south, some college graduates panic. Reductions in scientific equipment, cuts in travel grants for overseas conferences, fewer state scholarships for stays abroad, and the cancellation of research fellowships for new PhD students are underway. The construction of some new university campuses has been discontinued. Although the Higher Education Commission (HEC) says it can handle the budget cuts, several projects are being dropped.
When the money runs dry, some bad things will certainly happen: tuition fees will rise, scholarships will decline, and rural universities will have a disproportionate share of the burden. But the crisis could still be a blessing. This is a wake-up call that points to the terrible bleeding of scarce national resources from the higher education system.
Why continue to collect enormously expensive, but hardly used scientific equipment? Or reward rubbish publications masquerading as research? Why should university faculties and overseas administrators have junkets to Europe and elsewhere? Instead of spoiling ignorant professors with fantastic salaries, the worst should be dismissed. And instead of sending mediocre students to mediocre foreign universities, only exceptionally capable students should be paid the very best to study.
Higher education in Pakistan is in a terrible state, but the money can not fix it. The crisis is threefold: the crisis of freedom at universities, the crisis of spiritual impoverishment and the crisis of ethics and morality among students and teachers.
The broken university system of Pakistan requires fundamental attitude changes. Money can not fix it.
Our universities have fallen into the brick wall of religious orthodoxy and negated the very purpose of higher education. Basically, a university seeks to create an agency, that is, power of thought and action that goes beyond the wisdom received. Real universities around the world, unlike the ones we have, do not follow modesty; They take the lead by creating people who can create, invent, and imagine. Without the protection of personal and intellectual freedoms, this is impossible.
Tragically, the individual expression on our campus is brutally curtailed. Dr. Khalid Hameed, a professor of English at Bahawalpur University, was stabbed to death by a fanatical student for organizing a gender-conscious farewell party followed by a traditional jhoomar dance. The young murderer is proud of his remorse. Only a murmur of protest followed on BU.
Or take Mashal Khan, who was lynched by fellow students at Abdul Wali Khan University for a false blasphemy and whose body was dragged across the campus as hundreds cheered and recorded the event on video. Junaid Hafeez, once a brilliant young teacher at Bahauddin Zakariya University, spent six of his 29 years in solitary confinement in Multan Prison while waiting for the trial.
The university administrators strictly regulate the students.
Some universities - the University of Engineering & Technology (Lahore) and Bahria University (Islamabad) - have officially prescribed the headscarf for female students. But most institutions do not have to adapt themselves out of fear of students themselves. Behavioral changes at Quaid-i-Azam University are serious compared to 1973, my first year there. The veiled ones in my physics class are quiet notes makers who seldom have the courage to ask a question.
The second crisis: mental impoverishment and lack of expertise. Partially excluded from this criticism are art, architecture, management, most social sciences, and even areas such as agriculture and biotechnology. However, the level of incompetence is hard to believe in terms of the "hard sciences" such as mathematics, computer science, physics, engineering or theoretical chemistry.
Within each of these disciplines, only a handful of Pakistani professors earn their doctoral degrees. The rest would pass undergraduate examinations at places like Stanford, MIT or Cambridge, and most would not pass the demanding entrance exams for India's IITs.
Incompetence runs through the faculty of the university, the vice chancellors and the HEC itself. A HEC chairman suggested in a Dawn article that the HAARP experiment in Alaska - which was finally scrapped in 2015 - triggered earthquakes and floods in Pakistan. Another former HEC chairman publicly suggested that terrorist cells should be shut down at universities if parents "turn off television and the Internet early in the evening and send the students to bed." A senior and influential VC was co-supervising a doctoral thesis in physics, claiming that viewing different colors could cure cancer.
The third crisis concerns institutional morality. Choosing a teaching job may have little to do with your expertise. Instead, a combination of your ethnicity, personal relationships, religious beliefs, and social attitudes determines the outcome. Fraud and plagiarism of teachers or students are generally in order and can only be punished if other factors speak against a specific person.
Absent is a collegial culture that values scientific achievements and the virtues of honesty, accuracy, correctness, originality, and collaboration. But these very qualities make a university good or bad, not their buildings or playgrounds! Many departments are haunted by bitter turf wars. Often many are not even in conversation with their colleagues because of small and personal problems.
It is unlikely that this bleak scenario will change soon, and it will never change unless you take the stinging nettle and somehow force yourself through larger attitude changes. Those who refer to international university rankings that rate certain Pakistani universities are wrong. These for-profit foreign organizations remotely make nonsensical valuations by simply entering numbers. You have no way to assess local situations or to distinguish wrong data from real ones. (QAU does not have a technical department, but is just below Cornell University, according to the Shanghai 2018 list!)
Let's ask instead how scarce public money should best be spent today. The smartest way is to invest in the creation and maintenance of universities that are a long way from Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. Rural "universities" - even if they are not real universities - should not be set to false standards. Even though they are academically poor, they serve an important social purpose.
For rural youth - whose numbers are exploding - such universities offer opportunities for advancement and the opportunity to get in touch with the modern world. This is especially important for young women who would otherwise never live outside their home. Encounters with students and teachers in various rural settings - most recently last week at Sargodha University - make me optimistic. In such places, a reasonable, upright vice-chancellor can make a big difference. Some of these individuals exist but unfortunately are far too few.
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