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.
Professor Pervez A. Hoodbhoy in his article “How greed ruins academia” appearing in Dawn February 09, 2009 has discussed the merit of two decisions taken by Academic Council of Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU).
The first decision was not to concede to the demand of Professor Hoodbhoy to transfer certain powers for faculty appointments from the University’s Selection Board to particular department. The Academic Council did not agree with the proposal in order to minimize the role of powerful chairpersons in victimizing candidates for teaching positions on the basis of personal and ideological liking or disliking. As an elected member of the QAU Syndicate I am aware of how Chairman of a department tried to misuse his authority in destroying the career of his junior colleague, a bright Assistant Professor. First, the chairman recommended termination of his colleague just because he could not perform well in a short seminar in which he was not allowed to speak freely beyond a few minutes. The chairman ignored several teaching evaluation reports filled by students, recommendations of foreign referees and an enviable research record of the concerned teacher, who produced many more research articles in the past five years than the chairman himself. The Syndicate, where majority consists of prominent academicians from outside QAU, a supreme-court judge and a senior officer from the HEC, rejected the chairman’s recommendation. The chairman then tried to deny his same colleague the right to join as Assistant Professor on Tenure Track System (TTS) despite recommendation of Selection Board and approval by Syndicate. The Syndicate had to intervene and the aforementioned Assistant Professor’s joining was finally accepted by the Vice Chancellor himself.
With this backdrop of nonacademic considerations, the Academic Council took a wise decision in not giving veto powers to departments and rather voted to continue relying on foreign referees’ reports and recommendations of Selection Board in which chairperson of the concerned department, two of his/her nominees as subject experts and Dean of the faculty also participate along with several external members.
The second decision taken by the Academic Council was to abolish the condition of passing Graduate Record Examination (GRE) for obtaining PhD degree in any subject. This condition was faulty to begin with for several reasons.
During the 1970s and 1980s GRE used to be considered as one of the several yardsticks for measuring suitability of candidates from all over the world with diverse educational standards, seeking admission in certain American universities. But years of experience has shown that the value of these examinations is quite limited because it is much easy to secure good marks by mastering specific tricks to minimize the proportion of incorrect answers with little knowledge of the subject. This is the very reason why GRE has remained confined to a few North American universities. Most top-ranking universities in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Scandinavia, Australia and Japan do not require GRE in any subject. GRE in certain subjects, like economics has now been abolished and even the top-ranking USA universities such as Harvard, MIT, Chicago, Columbia, John Hopkins, no more require GRE in these subjects.
Another reason why GRE was scrapped was that it was recommended as a requirement for obtaining PhD degree, not for obtaining admission into the PhD program for which it was originally designed. Imposing this condition will degrade the value of our PhD degree.
Yet another reason was that GRE examination is offered in few subjects only. In most of the disciplines, like electronics, geophysics, statistics, computer, IT, economics, international relations and history, no GRE is offered. What is the merit of developing a local GRE test in these subjects if the masterminds of the test did not consider GRE desirable, in certain cases after years of bad experience?
As regards greed, the amount that the University pays for successful supervision of a PhD thesis is Rs 60,000, which is equal to just six working days salary of Professor Hoodbhoy, who considers himself head and shoulder above the rest of his community. In the subject of economics of which I have a fairly good idea, if a supervisor gives two hours a week to his/her PhD student for three years it amounts to about 300 hours. If this amount of time is used to teach an undergraduate course in a private-sector university, one can earn five to ten times more money. A plumber with little formal education earns about twice as much in 300 hours as a PhD thesis supervisor The only reason a university teacher supervises a thesis is that it adds to his/her research profile.
Being an old colleague of Professor Hoodbhoy I am aware of his enormous academic potential. Unfortunately over the past few years he has lost his race in academics and has turned his attention to media for glorification. I, like most of my colleagues, do not have unlimited time and energy to respond to his continuous criticism through print and electronic media. All I can ask him is to disclose to general public the number of PhD theses and research articles published in academic journals to his credit during the past 10 years. I also request him to disclose to general public the data source for his magic number of 80% of the university teachers who do not know the art of teaching.
Totally agree with Jaded.
Yawwwwn.. Hoodbhoy has nothing better to do than to complain and rant against anything and everything that goes on in the country. Seems like he has too much free time from his day job as a professor (which he has little to show for btw) in order to just sit and dismiss other people’s efforts with one stroke of the pen by calling them ‘failures’.
What accomplishments has Hoodbhoy to show for his years being a professor. It is his own failing that he is unable to even devise a research topic which would include usage of the Van De Graaf accelerator which his university posesses.
Hoodbhoy saheb, stay away from politics, stick to academia and stop trying to earn brownie points by criticizing everything.
Pervez Hoodbhoy has already become controversial otherwise, to head HEC we need somebody who is more acceptable to all.
I think Parvez Hoodbhoy should be given a chance to run HEC, since he has criticized it a lot and knows the areas where HEC has messed up. Infact, according to him, since the ‘HEC experiment’ is a ‘failure’, it should be rather easy for him to bring about at least some improvement in the status quo.
But lets not hold our breath until someone appoints Dr. Hoodhbhoy as Director of HEC. There is extreme intolerance in most governments and organizations (even worldwide) for people who question authority and tend to play the role of watchdog.