Adil Najam
Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, one of Pakistan’s pre-eminent intellectuals and someone who I and ATP holds in the highest esteem (here and here), has written a letter to the editors of Nature in response to the recent article (of which I was a co-author) on Pakistan’s higher education reform experiment.
I just wrote to Pervez requesting that in the interest of greater discussion on this important issue, he allow us to reproduce the letter here at ATP. He has graciously agreed.
We reproduce his letter, in full, here:
“Pakistan’s Reform Experiment” (Nature, V461, page 38, 3 September 2009) gives the impression of providing a factual balance sheet of Pakistan’s higher education under General Pervez Musharraf’s former government. Unfortunately, several critical omissions indicate a partisan bias.
Mention of the billions wasted on mindless prestige mega-projects is noticeably absent. Example: nine new universities were hastily conceived and partially constructed, but abandoned and finally scrapped after it became obvious that it was impossible to provide them with the most crucial ingredient – trained faculty. Similarly, fantastically expensive scientific equipment, imported with funds from the Higher Education Commission, remain hopelessly under-utilized many years later. They litter the country’s length and breadth. For instance, my university has been forced to house a “souped-up” Van de Graaf accelerator facility, purchased in 2005 with HEC funds. A research purpose is still being sought in 2009.
The authors conveniently choose not to mention that the 400% claimed increase in the number of publications was largely a consequence of giving huge payments to professors for publishing in international journals, irrespective of actual substance and quality. Not surprisingly these cash-per-paper injections had the effect of producing a plagiarism pandemic, one that is still out of control. In a country where academic ethics are poor and about a third of all students cheat in examinations, penalties for plagiarism by teachers and researchers are virtually non-existent.
Citing Thomson Scientific, the authors claim a large rise in the “relative impact” in some disciplines, based upon citation levels of papers published between 2003 and 2007. But did the authors try to eliminate self-citations (a deliberate ploy) from this count? If they had – as I did using an available option in the Thomson Scientific package – they might actually have found the opposite result.
While the authors laud the increase in the salaries of university professors by the HEC, they pay no attention to the disparities thus created. The salary of a full professor (after the raises) can be 20-30 times that of an average Pakistani school teacher. Money raining down from the skies has created a new dynamic as well. Naked greed is now destroying the moral fibre of Pakistan’s academia. Professors across the country are clamoring to lift even minimal requirements that could assure quality education.
This is happening in three critical ways. First, given the large prospective salary raises, professors are bent upon removing all barriers for their promotions by pressuring their university’s administration as well as the HEC. Second, they want to be able to take on more PhD students, whether these students have the requisite academic capacity or not. Having more students translates into proportionately more money in each professor’s pocket. Third, a majority wants the elimination of all international testing – such as the Graduate Record Examination administered from Princeton. These had been used as a metric for gauging student performance within the Pakistani system.
Pakistan’s failed experiment provides a counter example to the conventional wisdom that money is the most important element. Instead, an enormous cash infusion, used badly, has served to amplify problems rather than improve teaching and research quality. There is much that other developing countries can learn from our experience – and it is opposite to what the authors want us to conclude.
Dr. Hoodbhoy is a leading voice on science and education policy and has been the most prominent critic of the Pakistan Higher Education Commission (HEC) over the years. Personally, I can think of few who have been more committed to Pakistan’s higher education than him. For all of these reasons, I take his opinions very seriously, even when my own assessment might end up to be different from his, as it has been in this case
Since we have made our case in print and he has too, I will not go into rebuttals. Nor is that possible since the co-authors have not yet had a time to carefully and and collectively respond to this (the group was large, spread out across the globe, and deliberately structured to be diverse). But speaking strictly for myself, there are a number of points I would not disagree with (For example, in our article we have also been critical – although maybe not as much as Pervez would have liked us to be – of the domestic PhD program and the consequences of the incentives given). But that would not change my overall assessment. Our goal, as we saw it, was to look at the entirety of Pakistan’s higher education reform effort and, as honestly and as best as we could, to arrive at a collective assessment of the total impact (the good as well as the bad) in the very limited space we had.
Where our assessment does differ from Dr. Hoodbhoy’s, I think, is that while he clearly believes the Pakistan reform experiment to have “failed,” we believe that it is “too early to judge the outcome” but that some aspects of the experiment have and will give much better results than others. Where we do not differ is that like him (and I take the liberty of quoting from his email to me) we too “feel rather strongly on what’s needed for fixing our universities.” Our assessments may differ, but our goal is the same.
Importantly, we also agree that (and, again, I quote from his email), “its important to debate such issues.” It is in that spirit that I had asked Pervez to let us share his response here. A focus on how best to improve higher education in Pakistan is the core of all of our concerns, and was also the core of our recommendation in the paper “for an independent peer review of the HEC’s performance.” I hope that our readers can also help all of us focus much more on this very question which motivates all of us, Dr. Hoodbhoy, myself, and my co-authors: what is it that we have learnt so far and what is it that we should do in the future to strengthen and improve higher education in Pakistan.
Although beyond the scope of either the article or the response from Hoodbhoy, the question that has always bugged me most is why focus on higher education and why not on primary education. Unless you fix that first, higher education can never be fixed.
While discussing about the higher education, what we are forgetting and to which Hoodbhoy has slightly indicated is the state of primary and secondary education. It can easily be estimated by the disparities between the salaries of university professors and school teachers. Rot learning and memorization, along with a dangerous mix of manipulated religious and political ideas is what makes up our primary and secondary level education. Unless we are able to increase the level of primary and secondary education, we can never improve our higher education level. The deteriorating condition of government schools is making it extremely difficult for poor studenst to go into the higher educational institutions. HEC may try to increase scholarships meant for poor students but the poor students from school are finding it difficult to avail them. A large part of these scholarships go to affluent students and not the one at the bottom of the ladder.
So, is Hoodbhoy and others saying that they would have preferred no higher education reform? That we would were better off before the reforms than we are now?
If they are there is no point in debating this further, because if you really think that things in higher education were better in 2000 than now you are either dreaming or delusional.
If they are saying that much more could have been done with all this money and reform, then I woudl agree. But it seems so would the authors of this article. Yes, more could have been done. So, now, lets talk about what and how?
I have had a lot of interactions with the HEC and Pakistan’s academic sector as a student and then as a facutly member at one of Pakistan’s universities; where I am still working. I remember when I was in the final year of my engineering degree at one of the ‘so-called’ top notch engineering universities; research was non-existent and most of the faculty of our department had no idea what research or research papers are. Most of us used to think that research is something that only the west can do and is meant for people like Einstein. The state of the faculty was so terrible that we had only two PhD faculty members in our department. There was wide spread professional jealously and politics between the faculty members. The state was so bad that sometimes even students were dragged into this mess. “Boycott that professor’s exam and I will support you”, this is what a senior faculty member at our dept once told our class representative. Since my childhood I always had an inclination towards teaching however, after graduating (in 2003) I decided not to pursue academia as a profession simply because I did not want to become like the faculty at my uni.
But then came the HEC and its reforms. I now go back to the same university and I see that it has been transformed. Alongwith having better buildings and infrastructure it has really improved the quality of its faculty. And I feel that the quality of research has improved significantly also. The primary reason for this is that now students are now being guided by young, energetic and well qualified faculty members. I am now also a faculty member at another engineering university and have witnessed that there is a visible difference between the quality of education and research in comparison to what it was less than 10 years ago. And it was the HEC which awarded me a masters scholrship after open competition that convinced me to come back to the academic sector. As a faculty member I have seen numerous Pakistani uder-grad students getting PhD funding from international universities directly over the last couple of years. This happened because these students were supervised/ guided by faculty members who had recently returned from abroad and were up to date with the latest research methodologies. I myself have learned significanlty by interacting with these higly qualified faculty members. Infact I can say with confidence that I learned much more about research after returning to Pakistan than during the time I spent doing my masters abroad.
Another very encrouraging trend brought about by HEC has been making teaching jobs attractive for young people. I know most of my colleagues who have MS degrees are going abroad for PhDs and therefore I am also doing the same because otherwise I cannot compete. This sense of positive competition brought about by the HEC has been a major contributing factor in producing a positive and progressive environment in Pakistan’s unversities. And I am very optimistic about the impact that it will have on Pakistan.
That said, I am not saying that we have achieved perfection. There is still a lot to be done, but on a personal level I feel that the HEC has brought about a signifcant change in the environment at our universities and we are in a far far better position than we were not so long ago.
Adil:
You and Pervez are among a small group of people I admire greatly. So I am glad that this debate is happening. I was, and still am, a strong supporter of reforms in higher education in Pakistan, and I think there is a real need for analytical review of what all went wrong with the HEC efforts (and what went right as well).
I was, to be honest, surprised to see your name among the co-authors after I read the article. The article is an op-ed, so may not have received the kind of scrutiny one would expect from a Nature article in general, but I was hoping a critical analysis of such a massive reform effort would attempt to be more analytic and fact-based.
1. My biggest issue with the article was that it tried to avoid the tough issues that have already been brought up and discussed often in national newspapers. Why? I essentially found it saying to other developing countries: ‘please do reform, look at Pakistan as well when doing so, and do it better if you can’. That is a weak statement at best. Did you guys have a take-away message for the readers when you decided to write this? Maybe you can post that on Pakistaniat?
2. I think the way data was presented (and the slightly biased choice of data) leaves an impression on readers that the outcomes of education reform in Pakistan have been positive. That is not so clear, esp given the amount of money that was spent. The reality is that institution building capacity has not improved, faculty publications may have increased but the quality still suffers, international cooperation is happening largely because we fund them, and research topics being pursued by faculty are still lagging by more than a decade from where the rest of the world stands. Our students are unable to compete internationally, and inbreeding of Ph.Ds at universities has resulted in increase in plagiarism, shabby research output, and limited economic value-add post-degree. I was hoping to see more “Return on Investment” type metrics applied in your analysis to the money spent by HEC.
3. While almost all socially relevant sectors of our country are starving for investments – and any number of them would show some improvement along certain chosen vectors if large sums of money were thrown at them – the most critical problem in Pakistani higher education is that of governance and good faculty. What impact has reforms had in those two areas? Last time around, Atta had the ear of the President and he got to throw billions at education. next could be someone from another sector. How many billions can we waste without accountability, review, and external validation?
4. What is the focus of higher education in Pakistan? Is research and education closely tied to local industry? Are we solving local problems or challenging global problems? Or are we instead publishing barely incremental research on already published papers? Are we creating the workhorses for a global economy, or jobless degree holders in Pakistan?
5. Students: Are student being trained as problem solvers, and creative, innovative thinkers? What is their take on the reform agenda of the previous 10 years.
Anyways…the list is long and you are well aware of all these issues. I hope you will be among those who may eventually publish a proper analysis of the higher education reforms in Pakistan.