Reforms! What Reforms?

Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, appointed as chairman of the Higher Education Commission by General Pervez Musharraf in 2002, lays claim to setting up a "revolutionary programme" of reforms that is already reversing the decades-old decline of Pakistan’s universities. Not a day passes without the announcement of some big achievement -- a new university, college, equipment, training programs, awards and seminars. The chairman seems particularly proud of what he has achieved when it comes to promoting teaching and research in physics.

Dr. Atta is entitled to his opinion about his own success. My judgement, after over 30 years of teaching and research in physics at Quaid-i-Azam University, is that these reforms are not working. Our science institutions and universities are fast becoming intellectual and moral wastelands. Incompetence is rife. There is deep indifference, even antipathy, to scholarship and knowledge. Basic academic values are missing, and there is casual acceptance of abysmal ethical behavior -- cheating, lying, and plagiarism by faculty and students. Resources are wasted on an epic scale. And, the HEC whirlwind is making all of these problems worse.

The reasons for the failure of the HEC reforms are many. Money is one of them. There has been too much of it, too quickly. Foreign donor agencies and governments, fearful that an uneducated and unskilled Pakistan may become an epicenter of terrorism, have panicked and tripped over each other to offer aid for education. The higher education budget has skyrocketed over three years by an incredible 12 times -- a world record perhaps -- and then increased again in the latest budget (June, 2005) from 9.1 billion rupees to 11.7 billion rupees.

These fabulous sums pouring into higher education have created the all too familiar behaviour of the newly wealthy. HEC has paid for a massive publicity blitz, with huge newspaper advertisements and colored multi-page supplements, devoted to breathless self-promotion of HEC, its leadership and its projects.

The HEC boasts of over 350 scientific and university related projects, amounting to 25% of the total number of projects being executed by the Government of Pakistan in all fields. But looking at the projects on the HEC website (www.hec.gov.pk) produces disturbing proof of gross administrative incompetence, carelessness, wastage on an unprecedented scale, and a culture of sycophancy. Projects that bear no relation to meaningful improvements of science or education in the country are being approved in desperate haste. Some examples follow.


PROJECTS GONE ASTRAY

On June 25, 2005 the HEC chairman announced that the Higher Education Commission has sanctioned 180 million rupees ($3 million) for the establishment of a 5 MeV tandem Van de Graaf accelerator to be housed at the National Center for Physics, Quaid-e-Azam University. He described it as a "national facility" that will "accelerate the generation of competent scientific and technical manpower within the country".

For those familiar with the field, this is nonsense. Such Van de Graaf machines were the mainstay of research in physics seventy years ago. They are useless for cutting edge science research today. They are, at best, museum pieces.

The reader, who wishes to see what the developed world is doing with such equipment, should visit the website:
www.its.caltech.edu/~arice/tandem.html. This contains an obituary, written many years ago, at Caltech: "After 38 years of service to the Nuclear Astrophysics and Material Science communities, [Caltech’s tandem Van de Graaf accelerator] facility has closed. Sorry to see the old machines fade away. This one had been very good to us. Not putting it too delicately; the machine was cut up and sold for scrap." That scrap -- or more likely scrap from elsewhere -- is now headed for Quaid-e-Azam University where it will add to other scrap imported over the decades.

Still more inexplicable wastage: the HEC chairman says that another 164 million rupees will be spent on an experimental physics laboratory at QAU.
Alas, no researcher there -- who are my colleagues -- acknowledges being informed, much less consulted on the purpose and nature of the laboratory.

The department’s chairman alone admitted knowledge of the project, but flatly refused to divulge details. A pessimistic conclusion is that, as in the past, these millions will also prove to be highly enriching but not to science in Pakistan.


MISMANAGEMENT UNLIMITED

An HEC "Best University Teacher" program has been extensively advertised and promoted. Everyone would agree with the need to recognize and reward good teaching, and that the key to success lies in selecting the best teachers.

So how does HEC select the "best" university teachers? The obvious way, of course, is to ask students. They are after all the best placed to judge whether a particular teacher knows his or her subject well, can actually teach in class room, and has that special ability to inspire enthusiasm in students for the subject. But this is not HEC’s way.

The HEC asked department chairmen and deans to nominate who they think are the best teachers. It is no surprise then to discover that some simply named themselves, and others nominated their favorites. Students at my university laughed incredulously when they learned the names of individuals who had thus been selected as "best teachers".

To take another example, consider HEC’s "Master Trainers in Physics", a project that Dr. Atta cites as one of his successes in promoting physics.
The idea here is to encourage junior physics faculty in Pakistani universities to enhance their subject and teaching skills by attending workshops where they can be taught by skilled and experienced physicists.

The project is supposed to be managed by the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University, with junior faculty and "master trainers" brought in from around the country.

The "Master Trainers in Physics" is, put simply, a disgrace. The project is rife with crass cronyism and unfair selection. Some of the so-called "master trainers" hand-picked by the HEC -- and paid huge sums of money for every lecture -- know little about physics and have an abysmally poor reputation as teachers in their parent institutions.

The pattern that emerges is one where HEC chooses as a solution some of the very people who are part of the problem.


IS THIS RESEARCH?

HEC is allocating enormous sums for research. But these are being thrown at half-baked proposals that will add nothing of value to science in Pakistan. Good judgment has been abandoned at the altar of expediency, propaganda, and a compulsive craving to show progress.

In certain HEC projects, even common sense seems to be a casualty.
Consider, for example, Grant Number 247 on the "Research Grant Award List 2003-2004" (it is the most recent list given on the HEC website, http://www.hec.gov.pk/htmls/rsp/rgp/research.asp). This is a research project worth an astonishing rupees 5,581,000 (Rs 5.6 million) and is titled as "Quranization of Science Courses At The M.Sc Level". It was awarded to Dr. Saadia Khawar Khan Chishti, whose address is listed as "Higher Education Commission, Islamabad". The purpose of this project -- to inject religion into science courses -- is reminiscent of the failed efforts of long-dead dictator and ideologue General Zia-ul-Haq to create an "Islamic Science". Academic merit aside, it is hard to see how can anyone can justify spending such colossal amounts of money on something that involves nothing more than access to a library.

There are many other puzzlers on the same web page. A grant for Rs 5,355,000 has been awarded to the Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) for research in a specialized area of chemistry. According to the project summary, this work aims to correct the mistakes made in this area by a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry.

Such grand notions of challenging Nobel Prize winners are highly suspect in the world of science, but not impossible. What is worrying is how anyone believes this can be done at AIOU, which is a distance-learning university with no tradition of cutting edge chemistry research. The principal investigator listed for this project is not from AIOU and already holds several other full time jobs at other institutions. The HEC website lists him to be Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, chairman of the HEC.

There are other such projects and the costs runs into many millions of rupees. The explanation offered by the HEC for funding such projects is that they have all been vetted by independent scientific referees. But how true is this?

In the early days of HEC, some colleagues, as well as myself, were sent project proposals for refereeing. Some of the proposals we received made us wonder what HEC was doing by even sending them out for review. They deserved to be rejected out of hand. To offer just one example, I was sent a proposal for review that implicitly assumed it could violate a fundamental law of physics. (More specifically, it disrespected the second law of thermodynamics and demanded that heat should flow from a cold body into a hot body!).

Other proposals were more about making money than creating knowledge -- the cost of equipment and components was often given as 100 to 1000 times higher than what one normally expects. One project included a demand for a special $90,000 cyrogenic refrigerator which no obvious scientific purpose. Another requested a salary for a "computer operator" to run a laptop computer. When my colleagues and I rejected such proposals as unsound, we found ourselves quietly black-listed and received no more proposals to referee. The authorities apparently had no difficulty finding more pliable individuals, who approved payment for the scientific-sounding junk that now litters the HEC website.


PH.D FACTORIES

HEC has announced that the total number of PhD faculty in Pakistan is to be increased from the current 2000 to over 20,000 over ten years. Many of them will come from a HEC financed increase in local PhD production from the current 100-200 a year to 1000 annually, an increase by a factor of 5-10.

This is another disaster in the making. The painful fact is that the near-collapse of secondary schools and colleges means few students are now capable of benefiting from a genuine PhD level education. And, there are few Pakistani institutions capable of supporting genuine PhD level research work.

The HEC claims that it will check prospective PhD candidates through a "GRE type test" (the American graduate school admission test). A glance at the question papers shows that the HEC test is in fact a rather shoddy literacy and numeracy high school level test. It resembles the GREs only in that it is a multiple choice test.

To make sure the PhD scheme works, regardless of the quality of students, and faculty HEC pays supervisors a handsome monthly Rs 5000 for every PhD student they have enrolled (up to a maximum of 8 with HEC funding, but other sources are also available). This makes sure supervisors and departments take on as many students as possible and pass as many as they can.

The evidence is not hard to find. In my department, advertised as the best physics department in the country, the average PhD student has trouble with high-school level physics and even with reading English. Nevertheless there are as many as 15 PhD students registered with one supervisor! In the QAU biology department, that number rises to an incredible 40 students for one supervisor.

What will become of these hundreds and, in time, thousands of PhDs after they have been cranked out with no regard for quality of scholarship? What kind of teachers and researchers will they become? Eventually these PhDs will become heads of departments and institutions. When appointed gatekeepers, they will regard abler individuals as threats to be kept locked out. The degenerative spiral, long evident in any number of Pakistani institutions, will worsen further and become yet more difficult to break.


WHERE LIES THE PROBLEM?

We would be deluding ourselves to think that that difference between Pakistan’s universities, and those of our neighboring countries, is because of any real or imagined difference in the level of funding or resources. Consider mathematics and theoretical physics, which are academically the most intellectually challenging and difficult disciplines. They need only some modest salaries, an easily available computer, paper and pen, blackboard and chalk -- and plenty of brains. Yet these disciplines -- which flourish in India and Iran and cost next to nothing -- are almost extinct in Pakistan’s universities and scientific institutions. Clearly, the problem is a much deeper one than most people are willing to admit. The real problem lies in the realm of ideas and ideology, as well as management of institutions and organizations.

There is no doubt that some benefits have accrued from the HEC reforms -- with the huge amounts being spent it would be nearly impossible to avoid doing at least some good. Internet, digital libraries, and other such frills are nice to have. But even if this deluge of money from the skies is doing some good somewhere, the flooding it has caused elsewhere is doing enormous damage. It is time to stop and take a long, hard look at what HEC is doing with the public’s money.

HEC should stop all useless, sometimes fraudulent, research projects and stop encouraging the award of worthless PhD degrees. There needs to be a full financial audit of its accounts, and these should be submitted to the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee and the National Accountability Bureau. In addition, an international panel of independently appointed experts should perform an academic audit and do a comprehensive review.
This is essential to check the current squandering of resources, and wholesale corruption and cronyism. The review should be asked to lay out criteria for how to make future funding of higher education fair, transparent and accountable.


WHAT TRUE REFORM MEANS

True reforms -- if and when they are implemented -- will have to be divided into two mutually distinct sets. One set must deal with creating a freer university environment, controlling campus vigilantes, and stopping campus violence. These are purely administrative issues. Another set must be aimed at raising the level of general competence of teachers and students by ensuring that they actually have an understanding of the subject they teach or study, and with increasing the amount of research in specific disciplines.

More specifically, entrance tests for students must be made mandatory and efficiently administered. Examinations at the national level are essential to separate individuals who can benefit from higher education from those who cannot. No such system exists in Pakistan. Only local board examinations -- where rote memorization and massive cheating are rampant
-- are used to select students. Let us note that both Iran and India have centralized university admissions systems which work very well. Although corruption in India is perhaps as pervasive as in Pakistan, admissions to the IITs have nevertheless retained their integrity and intensely competitive nature over several decades.

At the PhD level, if the HEC is at all serious about standards, it should make it mandatory for every Pakistani university to require that a PhD candidate achieve a certain minimum in an international examination such as the GRE. These exams are used by US universities for admission into graduate programs. Thesis evaluation needs to be made transparent and subject to public challenge -- the present safeguard of having "foreign experts" evaluate theses is insufficient for a variety of reasons, including the manipulations commonly made in the (highly opaque!) process of referee selection.

Entrance tests for new university faculty must also be made mandatory. The system has remained broken for so long that written entrance tests for junior faculty, standardized at a central facility, are essential. Without them, universities will continue to hire teachers who freely convey their confusion and ignorance to students. Most teachers today never consult a textbook, choosing to dictate from notes they saved from the time when they were students in the same department. No teacher has ever been fired for demonstrating incompetence in his/her subject.

There is much else that will be necessary: better and more transparent ways to recruit vice-chancellors and senior administrators; foreign faculty (including those from India) to be brought in an organized and systematic manner; training courses to be fairly and efficiently executed; etc.

Reforming science and education in Pakistan has a chance only if it is clearly thought out and -- even more importantly -- if it is executed with honesty and integrity. The monumental task of reform has yet to begin.
Pakistan lost its giants, Abdus Salam and Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, a long time ago. Its academic institutions may have to wait a long time for someone to lead them out of the growing darkness.


A shorter version of this article, with certain crucial omissions, was published in The News on 07 July 2005.