STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

In an effort to enforce quality, the HEC recently announced that they would not recognize PhD degrees awarded unless the recipient manages to score a 40 percentile on the GRE subject test at the time of admission to the graduate program, reported here. This is a revision of HEC’s earlier policy, announced four years back, that the GRE subject test must be cleared before submitting the thesis. The announcement has proven controversial among PhD instructors and their students. Read the rest of this entry »

LUMS has been shut down for a week. And as I said to a friend, maybe it’s a good thing. Because we, the ones at LUMS, are so disconnected from Pakistan, that it had to take the death of seven students, seven of our people, to make us pause our movies and type google news instead of facebook in our urls. Because with the divide between classes here, it’s as if Pakistan is two countries; one where all the news comes from, bombs, stampedes at ration lines, acid attacks, rapes and one where LUMS is, where people (even a few crazy women) can walk the clean quiet streets of defence and cantt, where people dine in every increasing style, where the only effects of terrorism are a few tiresome roadblocks and the echos of blasts far far away. Terrorism has reached our country now and we are slightly disturbed at it.

So finally the budding intellectuals of Pakistan have turned their attention to this problem that they had heard about but never really experienced before this. But this turned out to be a problematic exercise for me. Ask me what I want to see in this country. And I can flood your ears with concepts such as pluralism, freedom, justice, democracy, even anarchism in the style of Noam Chomsky. But ask me, “how do you get to there, from here?” And I am mute. And my hands drop uselessly to my sides. Or rather, they go up and cover my eyes because there is no point of sight when you can’t move.

My philosophy won’t work here because I know what I want but I have no way to make it happen.

I want these killings to end. I want the discourse to become more nuanced than “Islamic terrorism”. I want people to realize that all Muslims aren’t killers and that to say so, even as a joke, is to open the door to a dangerous generalization. I want Muslims to be able to criticize Israel on it’s war crimes without being attacked as fundamentalists. I want Muslims to stop defending what’s happening in our country and stop using conspiracy theories to deflect blame onto the US and its cronies. I want things to become less simplistic. But it can’t happen. Because there are certain interests for USA in creating the image of a Muslim terrorist. Because there is a certain complacency in the Muslim attribution of blame to the west. We all want to blame someone because then the responsibility to fix the problem is placed on whoever is blamed. And man is inherently lazy.

I want the people of Pakistan to be united. But for so many groups with so many nationalist claims to unite under one banner or one leader or even one party is impossible.

I want Pakistan to be partitioned into it’s four provinces. But for that to take place without bloodshed is a myth unheard of in our part of the World. And then there is the problem of our geographical location. A problem that we refer to with a mixture of pride and sorrow. The problem is that we are essential to too many interests. We are a troublesome neighbor to far too many important countries for those interests to allow us to divide for internal peace. Better a war ridden Pakistan than four small states who don’t border all those territories that actually matter to the World.

I want us to not think in terms of nationalism and patriotism. Because what use are these constructs? Why is a fellow Pakistani worth anymore than someone who just happens to be born in Iran or India? Why can’t we cherish human life and human development regardless of which boundary it occurs in? We cannot because such trajectories of thinking have never been offered to us. We cannot because if every Pakistani began to think of him or herself as an individual and began to work for their own benefit, all Pakistan would get is a slap from the invisible hand. Individualism abroad means greater progress because there are structures in which that individualism is exercised. Here, individualism is destruction. It is individualism that makes so many LUMS students rejoice that our university has closed in the middle of exams, because they hadn’t studied and would have scored “below the mean” in a course. Yes, there are Pakistanis who are rejoicing in this moment.

I want such Pakistanis, all Pakistanis to realize what it means to be at war. I want us to work. Ceaselessly. Because work alone can produce results and yes, it might be a Western concept to cherish work oh-so-much instead of sipping tea with the family but I want us to realize that tea and drawing room chats won’t do anything for us. But we can’t. Because when we go to school we die; when we talk out loud, we disappear; when we write, they write back threats. And why should we work? Why should we bother, sitting in our generator powered homes, surfing the net on our shiny laptops, going to cafes and stealing kisses on campus? Of course the greatest issue for LUMS to consider is kissing on campus. Of course. Because what effect does Pakistan’s appalling Gender Equity Index ratings have on a campus where women make up nearly half the student body? What effect do rising food prices have for us, with our regulated cafeteria prices?

So maybe it is good that LUMS has shut down for a week. But will this week change anything, I wonder? An essay here, a comment there. And this week will pass. And the rat race within LUMS will begin again. And you and I, as rational actors, will realize that nothing we do can help Pakistan and we should simply help ourselves by burying our heads in our imported traditions, getting the grades and rushing abroad the first chance we get.

I want things to change. But they won’t. Because we are stuck, you and I and scores like us. And I don’t know how we can get unstuck.

Nature’s recent article on higher education in Pakistan has re-ignited the debate on higher education reform, evoking strong responses from both supporters and critics of the HEC. Recently, we interviewed the lead author Dr. Athar Osama, to learn more about his wider conclusions, and his response to some of the criticisms of the methodology used in the Nature article.

To seed this discussion, we present commentary from Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy and Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman. Dr. Hoodbhoy presents his opposing point of view, arguing that the measures presented in the article were inadequate, and further that the conclusions drawn from the metrics were flawed. Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman, founding (and former) chairman of the HEC, who led the higher education reform effort during his tenure, responds by pointing to data that, in his view, shows the depth and breadth of the reform’s success.

We invite our readers to contribute their thoughts on what metrics are appropriate for measuring the success of higher education within the context of Pakistan.

NOTE: Both commentators have significantly shaped the landscape of Pakistani education over the last few decades. We request our discussants to avoid personalizing the discussion and to maintain a civil and constructive tone.

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Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy has reproduced his email but not my subsequent response to it.

There are four aspects of the comments of Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy that need to be considered:

1. Firstly, Dr. Hoodbhoy himself admits that there has been a huge increase in international publications at QAU after HEC came into existence when he mentions the number of international publications in the two time periods. Strangely, he picks a six year period, 1998-2003, and then compares it with the subsequent 4.5 years (?) , 2004 to mid 2008, (the correspondence occurred in August 2008, so he could not possibly have had access to the figures for the entire year) I can only assume that he has mentioned 2003 by mistake in the second “5 year” period as there is no reason to include the publications of the year 2003 in both time periods, which he has done. It is clearly unfair to take two time periods of different durations and compare them.

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This communication is concerned with “Pakistan’s Reform Experiment” (Nature, V461, page 38, 3 September 2009), and the response to my critique by its lead author.

Unfortunately, I find the response as unsatisfying as the original article. Since Nature is unwilling to accord me a chance for a satisfactory reply on its pages, I shall clarify the basis of my criticism in some detail here.

In the said article, strong conclusions have been derived from weak data. The authors have not dared to ask the basic questions whose answers are essential for ascertaining whether there has been actual progress in Pakistan’s higher education system and, if so, by how much. Instead, in giving a thumbs-up, numbers have been quoted that have doubtful significance. Take, for instance, the claim that:

“In mathematics, for example, an average paper by a Pakistani author is cited around 20% more than the worldwide average for the discipline”.

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