As a teacher with a background in development, I am increasingly frustrated to see how education in Pakistan, nay around the world, far from “bringing up” the best talents of individuals, actually discourages any investment of time and effort into the individual’s interests. Rather, what is considered socially acceptable or economically pragmatic is assigned the greatest degree of importance. This can be seen in the hierarchy of subjects that we are all familiar with: Sciences and mathematics at the top, languages and social sciences in the middle, and arts at the very bottom. Ken Robinson, traces the genesis of this to the industrial revolution. “The whole system,” Robinson argues, “came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.” So, it is no surprise that “our educational system today, churns out students to fulfill the requirements of the Industrial Age” rather than those of the coming Information Age.

The result of this out-of-date education system, says Robinson, is that “we are educating people out of their creative capacities.” Creativity demands some level of risk-taking, but that is not what our education system values. “You’ll never come up with anything original if you’re not prepared to be wrong”, says Robinson. “Picasso once said … that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” The challenge for us, therefore, according to Robinson, “is to remain an artist as we grow up”, and not allow ourselves to “get educated out of it.”

At times the word creativity gets a bad rap in Pakistan because it is associated with the arts or music. While arts and music are two forms of creative expression, creativity is required in every field. Is there any successful scientist or social scientist who can claim that his or her success was independent of his or her ability to comprehend the world beyond the status-quo?

So, how can we create a culture that values creativity in our education system? Robinson makes the case for a revolution, not reform, in education. “I think we have to change metaphors”, says Robinson. “We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education — a manufacturing model that is based on linearity and conformity — to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it’s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which [students] will begin to flourish.”

The thrust of Robinson’s arguments is to promote an educational system that recognizes and rewards individual interests and talents and values creativity in all its forms. Students would be best served if our educational system “brought out” and nurtured their talents, regardless of what they maybe, enabling them to confront the intellectual and economic challenges of the future.

These arguments are particularly relevant to Pakistan. Over the past 20 years, curriculum reform has come to a standstill. It has been reduced to debates on whether there should be a chapter on Jihad or not, or whether the Chief Minister’s message should be inserted into text books. The proliferation of O- and A-level curricula has been viewed as a positive measure, as it offers the opportunity to study a foreign curriculum. However, the same system that we have adopted is considered outdated and in need for urgent review in the UK. We have not only divided our educational system between the have and have not’s, O-/A-levels vs. matriculation/intermediate, public vs. private Universities, even within these dichotomies we remain obsessed with the hierarchy of subjects and viewing intelligence in relation to outdated examination grades or standardized testing.

So where do we go from here? After viewing the talks above, I would hope that you would share (to some extent) my belief that we should value knowledge and education regardless of the subject concerned. That means valuing Theatre Arts with the same degree of relevance as Computer Science, or Tapestry Design with Mathematics! Why? Because in our schools we are producing students skilled for decades passed. As we can never be certain with what the future holds, we need a generation of students motivated in and enthusiastic about their talents.

So the next time your son, daughter, niece or nephew, friend or relative asks for advice or shares their aspirations – don’t recommend or reject professions or subjects. Instead, ask them “what are you really interested in”. Wait for the answer, resist the urge to pass judgment and respond “great!”

Syed Nadir El-Edroos is currently a teacher of sixth-form economics at Bellerbys College, London. He completed a Masters in Global Politics at the LSE and has an interest in education and its role in social and economic development.

In 2005, the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan imposed the requirement of clearing the GRE Subject Test prior to admission in the PhD programs. Students who were enrolled in the PhD programs at the time were required to clear the GRE Subject Test before submission of their theses. This article discusses the interpretation of the word “clear” used by the HEC , the fairness of this criteria, and the deficiencies in policies regarding the GRE Subject Test. We conclude that by imposing this requirement, HEC has created problems for students living far from big cities, those who do not have access to credit or debit cards, and those who cannot afford the hefty (approximately, Rs. 14,000) registration fee. In addition, the HEC team seemed unaware of the true mechanism of the GRE Subject Test, and as a result significant confusion exists as to what “clearing” the test really means.

Much of the text is taken from the HEC official letters and the GRE guides and the letters published by ETS.

When Did the HEC Decide?

The 7th meeting of Quality Assurance Committee was held on 19th April, 2005 in the regional office of the Higher Education Commission (HEC), Lahore (see [1]). The meeting started with the approval of minutes of the last meeting of the Committee. The minutes were approved and the explanation of “international” with the Subject GRE Test used in the draft. It was explained to the members of the committee that word “international” is placed with the GRE Subject Test to draw a distinction between the GRE Type Test which is locally designed and already in practice, and the  standard GRE Test which is universally available for certain disciplines. The majority of the members and the chairman of the committee did not agree with the word “international” with Subject GRE as it does not exist in international nomenclature of the test. At last the members of the committee decided;

The word “international” will be removed from the Subject GRE-Test as Quality criteria of PhD level studies and it will be written as Subject GRE-Test, where available* with clarification at the bottom that local test will be designed for those subjects in which Subject GRE-Test is not available.

What should be a qualifying criterion?

First of all, it is useful to know a bit about the grading terminologies used by Education Testing Service (ETS), USA for GRE Subject Test. Later, we will discuss them in detail:

• Score (or scaled score)
• % Below (or percentile rank)
• Formula score (or raw score)

On May 30^th, 2006, Chairman HEC, Prof. Dr. Ata-ur-Rahman issued a letter no. 1-15/Adv(QA&LI) /2006/1394, in which he mentioned;

For admission of new students to Ph.D. as well as for upgradation/conversion of students already admitted in M.Phil to Ph.D., an International GRE (Subject) Test must be qualified (at least 50% score presently which will be increased to 60% after 3 years)

Please note that neither has the ETS yet released any document/method to find a percentage score of GRE test nor does the result card give any information about it. The GRE result card gives information about the score, percentage below (we call it percentile) and formula score.

In 2007, Chairman HEC, Dr. Ata-ur-Rahman wrote a letter [3] to the Vice Chancellors in which he asked:

Could you kindly ensure that no students currently enrolled in the disciplines of Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology, Biology, English Literature, Chemistry, Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics, Psychology and allied disciplines are allowed to submit Ph.D theses in your university unless they have obtained at least a 50 percentile score in the respective international subject GRE examination. This is a rather low score presently and it will be increased to 60 percentile score in a couple of years.

In the letter mentioned above (in [3]), Dr. Ata-ur-Rahman used the term percentile score. As mentioned earlier, please again note that this terminology does not exist in the documents of ETS.

In July 2008, Prof. Dr. S. Sohail H. Naqvi, the Executive Director of HEC issued a letter [4], in which he mentioned the following criteria:

To “clear” the international GRE subject test the candidates will have to get Percentile Score equal or greater than the minimum Percentile Score which will be as follows:
i. 40% Percentile Score: Valid Until December 31, 2009
ii. 45% Percentile Score: Valid Until December 31, 2010
iii. 50% Percentile Score: Valid thereafter

So, what is a 40% Percentile Score?

If it is to be considered that Percentile Score means ‘percentile rank’ then 40% percentile rank means the 40% of 99 because the maximum percentile rank one can get is 99. Also this letter failed to clear the meaning of the word “Valid Until …”

In October 2009, Mr. Muneer Ahmed, Deputy Director (Quality Assurance), HEC issued a letter [5], to clarify the following:

I am directed to clarify that the qualifying score for the PhD Scholars who appeared in the International GRE Subject Test before 31st July 2008 is 40% (percentile) or 50%(percent) and after 31st July, 2008, percentile formula as conveyed earlier through the letter quoted above ([2] and [4]) will be applicable.

There was no need to say anything about such non-clarification. From the series of letters it is obvious that HEC was and still is facing dilemma about the criteria of clearing GRE.

In January 2010, HEC commission approved that [6]

GRE (International) Subject Test will be necessary at the time of admission to M.Phil/MS Programme leading to Ph.D.
The minimum acceptable scores are as follows:
i. 40% Percentile Score: Valid for Admissions until December 31, 2009
ii. 45% Percentile Score: Valid for Admissions until December 31, 2010
iii. 50% Percentile Score: Valid for Admissions until December 31, 2011.
iv. 60% Percentile Score: Valid for Admissions thereafter.
For presently continuing students (Admissions before January 11, 2010), the candidates must pass the GRE (International) Subject Test before submission of Ph.D. Dissertation. In disciplines where this test is not available, the test will be made available locally by National Testing Service (NTS), and if the Test is not available in NTS subject list, then a University Committee consisting of at least 3 Ph.D. faculty members in the subject area and approved by the HEC will conduct the Test at par with GRE (International) Subject Test.

Please note that the term “Percentile Score” doesn’t exist, it might be % below or percentile rank. Also clause (i) of above para has already been expired with respect to this letter [6] because it has now been imposed as a criterion to get admission in MS/M.Phil. Moreover subjects for which GRE test is not available, parallel to GRE Subject Test; the university commission of at least three PhDs will form their own test. This creates an injustice in many ways like fee, quality of test, checking criteria, and scoring method.

The text of the letter mentioned in [6] is available on the HEC website and it has been modified by the HEC without any intimation (it can be accessed here and old one is included in references). In the new letter, this test is only mandatory to get admission in PhD and also the word “international” with GRE Subject has been removed.

In March 2010, on answering a query from NUST, Rawalpindi, Mr. Muneer Ahmed wrote as follows [7]:

I am directed to inform you that all students enrolled/converted into PhD programme after May 31, 2005 and before July 31, 2008 are required to qualify International GRE Subject Test with 50% (percent) score and students enrolled/converted after July 31, 2008 have to qualify International GRE Subject Test with percentile score as mentioned in letter no. 1-10/(ED)/HEC/2008/961(copy attached)

It is not possible to find the percentage score of GRE Subject Test (see [8, p. 14]) and other thing is that why Mr. Muneer Ahmad didn’t refer to a latest letter[6] issued in January 2010.

In the following table we give the 50 percent score of each subject defined by the HEC as the 50 percent of the total scaled score. Please note that the HEC defined the score at 99 percentile rank in [10, page 14] as a total scaled score.

To get the 50 percent score in Chemistry and Computer Science, one has to just appear in GRE Subject Test without answering to any question.

How should we use the GRE, according to ETS, USA?

The “GRE Guide to the Use of Scores 2008-09” gives comprehensive information about the GRE test and is the best booklet to learn about the GRE grading terminologies. It is published by the GRE board. This guide is available on the ETS website; the following sentences/paragraphs are taken from this guide.

• Primary limitations of GRE test

Any GRE test, however, has two primary limitations: (1) it does not and cannot measure all the qualities that are important in predicting success in graduate study or in confirming undergraduate achievement and (2) it is an inexact measure; that is, only score differences that exceed the standard error of measurement of a given score can serve as reliable indications of real differences in academic knowledge and developed abilities [8, p. 5].

• Encouragement of appropriate use.

All users of GRE scores have an obligation to use the scores in accordance with published GRE Board policies and guidelines. Institutions have a responsibility to ensure that all individuals using GRE scores are aware of the GRE Board score-use policies and guidelines and to monitor the use of the scores, correcting instances of misuse when they are identified. The GRE Program staff is available to assist institutions in resolving score-misuse issues. [8, p. 6]

• Use Multiple Criteria

Regardless of the decision to be made, multiple sources of information should be used to ensure fairness and balance the limitations of any single measure of knowledge, skills, or abilities. These sources may include undergraduate grade point average, letters of recommendation, personal statement, samples of academic work, and professional experience related to proposed graduate study. GRE scores should not be used exclusively. [8, p. 6]

• Accept Only Official GRE Score Reports

The only official reports of GRE scores are those issued by Educational Testing Service and sent directly to approved institutions and organizations designated by the test takers. Scores obtained from other sources should not be accepted. [2, p. 6]

To ensure the authenticity of scores, the GRE Board urges that institutions accept only official reports of GRE scores received directly from ETS. [8, p. 9]

• Avoid Decisions Based on Small Score Differences

Small differences in GRE scores (as defined by the standard error of measurement) should not be used to make distinctions among examinees. Standard errors of measurement (SEMs) vary by test and are available in this publication. [8, p. 7]

• Minority Examinees (Students outside of USA)

GRE scores, like those on similar standardized tests, cannot completely represent the potential of any person, nor can they alone reflect an individual’s chances of long-term success in an academic environment. It should be remembered that the GRE tests provide measures of certain types of developed abilities and achievement, reflecting educational and cultural experience over a long period. Special care is required in interpreting the GRE scores of students who may have had educational and cultural experiences somewhat different from those of the traditional majority. [8, p. 8]

• Confidentiality and Authenticity of GRE Scores

GRE scores are confidential and are not to be released by an institutional recipient without the explicit permission of the examinee. GRE scores are not to be included in academic transcripts. Dissemination of score records should be kept at a minimum, and all staff who have access to them should be explicitly advised of the confidential nature of the scores. [8, p. 9]

Different types of scores

It is also useful to reiterate that there are three types of grading system in GRE subject.

• Score (or scaled score)
• % Below (or percentile rank)
• Formula score (or raw score)

[ Cutout: Report of Scores ]

The range of scaled scores is from 200 to 990, in 10-points increments, although the score range for any particular Subject Test is usually smaller [2, page 11]. Scaled score is a basic analogy to compare two examinees.

Scaled scores on the same Subject Tests generally are directly comparable across years. A Chemistry Test score of 650 in 2007, for example, should be considered equivalent to a Chemistry Test score of 650 earned in 2006. [8, p. 11]

Percentile rank means the percentage of examinees in a group who obtained scores lower than specified score [9]. Percentile ranks of two examinees cannot be comparable for two different tests on same subject, while score is comparable for same subject test but not for different.

Subject Test scores should be compared only with other scores on the same Subject Tests (for example, a 680 on the Physics Test is not equivalent to a 680 on the Chemistry Test). Percentile ranks should be compared only if they are based on the same reference population. [8, p.7]

ETS writes the following about Score and Percentile rank.

Note that although a score represents the same level of ability regardless of when the score was earned, its percentile rank may vary, depending on the scores of the group with which it is compared [9].

Percentile ranks shown on score reports are based on the performance of the current reference group for each test regardless of when the scores were earned. The percentile rank for any score may vary over the years depending on the scores of the group with which the score is compared. Thus, when two or more applicants are being compared, the comparison should be made on the basis of their respective scores.[8, p. 9]

At the score of 700 in Computer Science there is a 42 percentile rank for the performance of the all examinees who were tested between July 1, 2004 – June 30, 2007 (see [8, p. 14]) and 40 percentile for the performance of all examinees who tested between July 1, 2003 – June 30, 2006 (See [10, p. 14])

One can find the following about percentile rank by flipping the “Report of Scores*”.

The percentile ranks in this report indicate the percentage of examinees who scored below your score. Note that these percentile ranks may be different from those that applied when the score were originally reported to you if the scores were earned prior to July 2009. This reflects annual updating of these data to permit admission officers to compare scores, whenever earned, with those for a recent reference group.

Formula score is the number of correct responses* minus one-fourth the number of incorrect responses rounded to the nearest whole number. The maximum formula score depends upon the total numbers of MCQs in the test.

* Result card sent by ETS, USA to the examinee or score recipient.
** Here “responses” mean questions which are usually multiple choices.

Is it an international test?

It should be remembered that the GRE tests provide measures of certain types of developed abilities and achievement, reflecting educational and cultural experience over a long period. Special care is required in interpreting the GRE scores of students who may have had educational and cultural experiences somewhat different from those of the traditional majority. [8, p. 8]

HEC officials are saying it an “international” test but the facts are against it. In the following table the number of examinees, all over the world, are given who took test between July 1, 2004, and June 30, 2007 [8, p.14].

Please note that computer science is one of the biggest fields of study and only 1870 examinees took the GRE Subject Test in a year.

General Rules for PhD Scholars

If someone gets the admission in PhD, then generally he/she has to fulfill the following requirements to get the PhD degree (no doubt, these are major requirements).

• Approval of Research Proposal or Synopsis (before or after the admission)
• Course work (not compulsory all over the world)
• Research paper (not compulsory in some countries but compulsory in Pakistan.)
• Thesis writing
• Defense of the thesis

If the thesis of some Pakistani PhD scholar is ready for submission then he cannot submit his thesis because of the extra imposed condition of GRE Subject Test, which is usually used as a recommended test (but not required) to get admission in the few universities of USA (see number of examinees per year as a proof). Also this shows that research paper(s) and thesis of the PhD scholar have no worth and no quality without this test.

It is also strange that if the PhD scholar has qualified GRE Subject Test then all the work (research) done under the supervision of such person (supervisor), who is usually non-qualified in GRE Subject Test, attains HEC quality standard.

Taking the GRE Subject test and other information

If someone decides to take GRE Subject Test, then the only way is online registration through ETS website by using online payment mode (by Credit or Debit card).

• Test Fee: 160 US Dollars (Rs. 14000 approx.)
• Duration: 2 hours and 50 minutes
• Conducted thrice a year (in April, October, November)
• Centers (Pakistan): Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore
• Limited number of seats in every center.
• Result announcement after 40 days of the test date.

Conclusions

1. The GRE Subject Test spans 2 hours and 50 minutes, at the price of US$ 160 (approximately Rs. 14,000). It is not affordable for a majority of the students and this heavy cost puts real extra burden on these students. In fact, many good students, who would easily pass it, hesitate to take the GRE Subject Test because of its huge fee.
2. Percentile rank is best to compare the students of same subject in the same test (in which they appeared) but it is not recommended to be used as a tool for making merit.
3. ETS recommends the use of “Scaled Score” for comparing the ability of students as they appear in the test at different schedule (three times in a year).
4. This test is not generally meant to be used for the students and institutions outside the United States.
5. Most public sector universities in Pakistan are not score recipients of ETS and it is very easy to use fake result cards to get admission, and the ETS never confirms the result to institutions if they are not score recipients.
6. It is very difficult to register for the test because many students don’t have Credit or Debit cards for payment through the internet.
7. Pakistan is a very big country and this test is conducted only in three cities, with limited number of seats at each location. This is really creating a big problem for the students living far from these cities.
8. The number of examinees per year clearly indicates the popularity of the test. For example, 1870 students in the subject of Computer Science and 2797 students in the subject of Chemistry appeared in a year all over the world.
9. Percentile rank actually is a comparison of the students of certain group taking GRE Subject Test in a period of last three years with respect to the test date. In eight subjects, Pakistani students are compared against a small community of students from all over the world, and for the remaining subjects the criteria is totally different.
10. The HEC team was unaware of the true mechanism of the GRE Subject Test. Yet, they decided that a PhD scholar must appear in this test, just to meet international standards no matter what he/she will score.
11. There are a lot of deficiencies in the HEC letters regarding GRE Subject Test. Against the decision of 7^th meeting of Quality Assurance Committee of HEC, the HEC officials are still communicating it as an international test.
12. All the grading terminologies used by the HEC don’t match with the ETS standard terminologies.This clearly shows that HEC officials are unaware of the objective and mechanism of the GRE Subject Test.

References

[1] Minutes of the 7th meeting of Quality Assurance Committee dated 19th April, 2005
[2] No 1-15/Adv(QA&LI) /2006/1394 dated May 30, 2006
[3] No. 4-7/CHR/HEC/07/807 dated April 3, 2007
[4] No. 1-10/(ED)/HEC/2008/96/ dated July 14, 2008
[5] No. 1-G/DD-QA/HEC/2009/45 dated October 23, 2009
[6] No. 4-7/CHR/HEC/2010/06 dated January 11, 2010
[7] DD/QA/HEC/NUST/2010/224 dated March 05, 2010
[8] GRE Guide to the Use of Scores 2008-09
[9] Interpreting Your GRE® Scores (2008-09)
[10] GRE Guide to the Use of Scores 2007-08

All the references can be downloaded from here.

Atiq-ur-Rehman is a PhD scholar at the Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan. His areas of research are difference and functional equations, real functions, inequalities in monotonic, and convex functions and he has 8 research papers. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of STEP.

Throughout my life I have hated mathematics with a passion. I hated its rules and notations. I hated the fact that I had absolutely no say in whatever was going on in the class. I just had to sit there and listen to my math teacher go on and on about formulas, notations needed to write these formulas, practice questions which would help us memorize these formulas and eventually “practical problems” which were supposed to exhibit the relevance of these formulas in everyday life although even the eight year-old me could tell that these were merely the same practice questions loosely disguised in the most unlikely of social situations known to man. And frankly, I didn’t care. I didn’t care where x was, or how much older Mary was than her brother Mark or when train A would reach London. As far as I was concerned math was an obsolete science to which I didn’t want to contribute to and which, for the most part, didn’t really want me to contribute to it anyway.

Therefore it comes as a surprise to many people that I am currently a Computer Science major focusing on theoretical computer science, which is basically a branch of mathematics. I, who had once famously given a speech to my seventh-grade math class about the pointlessness of mathematics, am now the one trying to explain to other people the beauty of Erdos’ brilliant proofs. And it all started with the following beautiful proof of the infinity of prime numbers:

For any finite set  {p_1,p₂…p_r} of primes consider the number n= p_1..p_2..p₃…p_r +1. This n has a prime divisor p but this is not one of the {p_1,p₂…p_r}, otherwise p would be a divisor of n and the product  p_1..p_2..p₃…p_{r ,} and thus also of the difference n-( p_1..p_2..p₃…p_r) =1, which is impossible.  So a finite set {p_1,p₂…p_r} cannot be the collection of all prime numbers.

I first heard of this proof in the first lecture of a discrete mathematics course I took during my sophomore year at university. The instructor didn’t even write the proof down, with all its messy set notation. He just told us about the idea of putting the prime numbers together in a group and showed us what goes wrong if we assume the group to be finite. At first I thought this was one of those introductory shenanigans professors deploy in the first class to get students interested. How could something so simple be counted as math? Where were the fancy symbols and the list of variables with their definitions? Where was the list of steps used to reach the conclusion? Where were the ten similar questions I needed to solve at home for practice? This was simply a clever idea used to solve a problem. Surely, this couldn’t be math! But, as I have learnt in the past year, this is basically what math is: a set of simple ideas used to solve problems. Sometimes the problems can be simplified to older problems for which people have already come up with solutions. Sometimes ideas which have been used to solve a certain problem can be used to solve an unrelated problem. But the simplicity of the process remains intact. It is the ‘idea’ which is at the heart of all mathematics, and to come up with ideas you just need creativity (and maybe a pencil and a notebook).

If a course can change the path of a person’s life, then this discrete math course changed mine. In the course of nine weeks, I was introduced to the kind of math I hadn’t even known existed. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like a robot while doing math. I actually had to think about the problems and figure out strategies for solving them. While I was introduced to techniques like induction and graph theory, for the most part my assignments and exams required me to come up with my own strategies based on these techniques and my own logical arguments and common sense. Math was like an elaborate game and finally I felt like it actually wanted me to take part.

So, this brings us to the central question: why did I, and countless other students, hate elementary and high school math? What needs to be done to make mathematics more interesting to students? Although I do not have any experience teaching mathematics, I do remember the reasons why I hated it so much and know exactly what eventually made me realize that I wanted to study a branch of mathematics as my major. For the sake of this article, I am going to ignore factors which affect all subjects alike and focus on why math has become such a hated subject.

Looking back at my years of struggling with high school math the first word that comes to mind is boredom. And this was not caused by a lack of interest in school because I was generally a very enthusiastic kid. I loved studying languages, history, and science. It was just math that I dreaded. And looking back at the way math is taught it comes as no surprise. While all other subjects are taught as an amalgamation of the history, foundations, rules and applications of the subject, math is mainly limited to the rules of the subject. Take a typical sixth grade science class. I remember learning about the effect of different factors on the rate of evaporation by placing different shaped beakers filled with water all over the school campus. What followed was a memorable class in which we all had mock “evaporation races” as we timed the beakers to see which one would lose its water first.It was only once we had made our own conclusions about which factors affected evaporation, that our teacher explained Brownian motion to us. She also mentioned factors such as surface area and wind-speed, which most of us had been able  to conclude for ourselves based on the observations we had made.

Now compare this to a typical sixth grade math class. Looking back, sixth grade was when some of the most wonderful mathematical concepts were introduced to us. It was in the sixth grade that we first encountered the idea of a variable and started to really analyze shapes. Statistics was introduced, and we started manipulating probabilities to get results which even now give me the feeling of being able to predict the future. But in the midst of all these amazing ideas, this is how a typical math class would go:

Teacher: An isosceles triangle is a triangle which has two sides of equal length. Okay?

Students: YES!

Teacher: So what is an isosceles triangle?

Students: A TRIANGLE WHICH HAS TWO SIDES OF EQUAL LENGTH !

And you can bet one of the questions on the progress test would be: “What is an isosceles triangle?”. In such a situation who would be interested in math? And these are not just two extreme examples I have mentioned to prove my point. Science that year continued to keep us hooked: we grew plants in inky water, caught insects in jars, experimented with mirrors and discovered the material we were supposed to learn, while in math we moved on to triangles which had no sides of equal length (I honestly don’t remember what they were called, though I think it begins with an s) and other lexical atrocities.

You may argue that science is an extreme example and that math just doesn’t have the exciting material needed to keep students hooked. While science teachers can use models, take their students outside or perform simple experiments to demonstrate their material, math teachers have nothing to interest a group of thirty kids. Not only do I disagree with this, I actually claim that it is the other way round and that it is the math teachers that have it good. While science teachers need extensive (and often non-available) funding to buy lab equipment and take their students out on field trips, all a math teacher needs are thirty pencils and notebooks. And how does he keep them interested? Well, he actually asks them to do some math. Do you remember the puzzle we probably all tried as kids in which we had to draw a house without lifting our pencils. That is just a simple example of a Eulerian path. And those complicated strategies for winning card games that our older siblings tried to explain to us were mostly simple applications of probability. The tower of rings of increasingly small diameters which we had to shift to another peg is the most common example given for recursive algorithms. The list of interesting mathematical problems which we solved willingly as kids is endless. Nim, Hex, magic tricks, and riddles in which we had to find loopholes in logical arguments are all example of the math we enjoyed as children and it is these problems which should be bought to the classroom to make math classes more interesting.

Another issue which I find with the way mathematics is taught, which is closely related to the first, is the extreme and almost exclusive emphasis on the utterly mundane aspects of mathematics. Take the isosceles triangle example above. Would it really have mattered if we had called the triangles, “triangles with two equal sides”? Maybe shortened to TWTES (pronounced tevtes). What’s important are the properties of these triangles. Instead of asking a child to spend time trying to memorize the pronunciation and spelling of this weird word, she should be asked to think about how they are made, and how the angles inside this triangle are related to each other. I am pretty sure if a child made a dozen different TWTES’ she would figure out most of their  properties for herself and she would actually enjoy the mental excursion of discovering these properties instead of hastily be given a list of them in the last fifteen minutes of class.

Admittedly, there are some terms and jargon that a student of mathematics must learn in order for the classes to be held smoothly and for the students to eventually take part in the wider mathematical discourse. But no other subject puts even half of the emphasis that math places on its lexicon. Take the example of chemistry. If a subject has the right to focus on terminology it is chemistry, with it’s multitude of  symbols, chemical formulas and specific reactions. But not once do I remember a chemistry teacher reciting the names of the elements along with their atomic symbols. Instead, we focused on the elements and their reactions and any time we needed help deciphering a symbol we could simply look it up on the huge periodic table taped to the classroom wall. Maybe that is what mathematics needs: a periodic table of shapes and functions which would be taped to the wall of every classroom. Then, children all over the world could forget about mathematical terminology and actually do some math.

And by ‘doing math’ I don’t mean the mindless repetition, or solving exercise problems at the end of every chapter. As a result of school mathematics, most people end up believing math is the application of known rules to problems that we know the rules can solve. That is the job of an accountant or a cashier or an insurance planner. A mathematicians  job is much simpler. He must come up with the rules that other people are to use. When faced with a problem, he is not told that it can be solved using the second trigonometric identity; that is what he must figure out. And while this is harder than simply applying a set of rules, the result of coming up with a solution is infinitely more rewarding. You can compare the two as the difference between the joy a child feels in having an adult place him on a bike and push him along, and the joy he feels when he races through the park himself. It is hard to teach him how to ride and it might take him ages to learn but all parents understand that the end result is worth it. Math teachers should definitely do the same with their students.

And if difficulty was such a major barrier, why doesn’t it stop teachers of other subjects from trying to get their students to appreciate the beauty of their fields? By the end of high school most of us have faced the toughest aspects of most of the other subjects. We have read Iqbal’s poetry and critiqued it with our peers. We have a deep understanding of how the major systems of the body work. We have built electrical devices and have made original pieces of art in a range of different mediums. Then, why is it that most of us only experience the joy of coming up with a true mathematical proof well into our undergraduate programs? Surely there is something wrong going on here.

Perhaps equally impressive was the faculty that LUMS was able to assemble for this nascent school. It was a small — perhaps too small — group of promising young researchers, brought together by the project team to set the standard for LUMS SSE. Leading this group at the time was Dr. Asad Abidi, a professor at the Electrical Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Professor Abidi was born and raised in Pakistan and moved to England at age 16. After earning his B.S. from Imperial College London, he went on to complete his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. Following a brief stint at the Bell Research Labs in New Jersey, in 1985 Professor Abidi joined the faculty at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.  An accomplished researchers and a pioneer in the field of RF CMOS design (the stuff that’s at the heart of our cell phones), Professor Abidi has won numerous honors, culminating with his election to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional honor accorded to American engineers for their life-time achievements.

In the summer of 2007, Professor Abidi went on leave from UCLA and joined LUMS as the first dean of SSE. There he played a pivotal role in setting the direction of the school. But, less than two years later, Professor Abidi was back at UCLA and at his home in the beautiful Pacific Palisades, California. That is where STEP Editor Bilal Zafar sat down with Professor Abidi to talk about LUMS SSE (Part 1), and much more (Part 2).

STEP: You were leading LUMS SSE when the first batch of students was admitted. In so far as the science and engineering universities are concerned, SSE’s process of student-induction was unique in Pakistan. What sort of students was LUMS SSE looking for in that first batch?

Asad Abidi (AA): We wanted to bring in students who could be groomed to be future leaders in science and technology, and who could influence hundreds of others. So, we handpicked the few who had a combination of things; academic excellence was not the only thing. Do they, for example, have passion? It’s too early to have passion for science – although some of them already demonstrated that – but do they have passion at all? Do they have leadership skills? Do they have a personality that could influence others? Do they have breadth in their intellect? So, we were looking for a personality and a total character that suggested entrepreneurship, leadership, and so on.

LUMS SSE is an intellectually elite institution and that was the basis for our selection criteria. Our aim was to focus this kind of very intellectually elite education on people who will have a 10x impact when they come out.

STEP: One popular criticism of LUMS SSE is that it might turn out to be a great institution, but it will be an institution for a few hundred people in a nation with 25 million people of university-going age. Can an institution like this really have an impact?

AA: It is too early to say, but it has a very clear precedent and model. And the model is institutions in the US like MIT or Caltech.

The idea was that each one of the students would be educated broadly and deeply in math and science or engineering, hopefully go on to do PhDs, then return to Pakistan or engage with it somehow to influence hundreds of others. That’s why we handpicked the few who had a combination of qualities.

At the first orientation, we told all the students, and their parents were sitting with them, that every one of you is going to make a significant change to Pakistan in the end.  You don’t know how yet. You may turn out to be a technical entrepreneur, start a high-tech company, you may turn out to be a world-renowned professor … we don’t know. But every one of you is going to have an impact, because that is our mission — to produce an entire generation of scientific and engineering leaders.

I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with focusing this kind of elite education on a small group of students. We cannot have every institution that is egalitarian; it’s just not possible.  There are many other universities in Pakistan that are egalitarian, and they do a fine job. Our argument is that there is room for one elite institution; a place at which people look and say, what are they up to? How do they teach the such-and-such subject? So, in terms of curricular innovation, bringing in research, and even administrative things like selection of undergraduates, LUMS SSE can be a trendsetter in Pakistan. So, I think there is room for one such institution.

STEP: Just one such institution?

AA: Yes, you can’t have two simply because there’s not enough faculty.  To have two world class institutions, you need two world class faculties. You can’t even get one together.

STEP: Harold Shapiro, former President of Princeton University, argues in his book “A Larger Sense of Purpose” that, in order to have a sound higher education system, you need strong interaction between world-class research universities in the country and other, less prestigious teaching institutions. To me, as an outsider, LUMS SSE comes across as if it exists in bubble inside Pakistan. For example, there are very few joint appointments between professors at, say, Quaid-e-Azam University or UET Lahore or NU-FAST or NUST and LUMS. Why is that?

AA: I completely agree that there has to be open communication with the whole community because, all the institutions that define the (higher education) eco-system play complimentary roles.

To your point about SSE “existing in a bubble”, I think it’s a little more complex than that. First of all, there is a lot of fear in Pakistan that, unless you are on guard, you’ll become mediocre. There is a history of erosion of institutions such as GIKI that had started with a bang. But, that does not mean that you put things in a bubble.  What it means is that, first, you build a critical mass that defines excellence and exemplifies it. Once you have the critical mass of faculty, then you can start engaging people from other institutions who come in and actually feel uplifted by their experience and their interaction. So, while SSE was going through this period of defining its culture as an institution, perhaps it came across as existing in a bubble.

Then, there are a lot of other factors which I’m not sure I want to go into too much. I’ll only say this much: there was a sense of elitism amongst the people involved in developing SSE, and I suppose you could argue that as long as it is intellectual elitism, perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. But taken to extremes in the Pakistani milieu, elitism and over-zealousness can do damage. With the growth of the institution, I feel there is more maturity and less fear, less insecurity.

The fact of the matter is that the present faculty is so small that it is already stretched to the limit.  Next year, SSE would have three classes (freshman, sophomore and junior year) and at that point the faculty would have to bring in other people just to teach. So, I think that circumstances will force SSE to open up.  I was promoting some of this (while I was there), but at that early stage there was some opposition to this. My view was that you have to guard these fledgling institutions until this sense of excellence takes root, and once the institution knows where it’s going it should take others along with it.

STEP: Let’s get to the issue of sustainability. Can an institution like SSE sustain itself – financially as well as administratively — or will it be just a flash in the pan like many others?

AA: As of right now, it’s very hard to say. On the one hand, you can look at LUMS as an institution and say that it has been very resilient. Over the past 22 years it has only improved and, today, it enjoys a preeminent position in Pakistan. But that’s the business school, and more recently, social sciences and humanities; the Science and Engineering School is the newest addition. However, given the entirely different cultures, past success is no reliable predictor of the future.

The fragility at SSE, first of all, comes from its finances. Science instruction is an expensive enterprise. For science instruction you have to have building infrastructure, lab equipment, consumables and safety, etc., whereas in business instruction you need desks and computers. Also, SSE set a precedent by recruiting faculty with the promise that it could do publishable research, and that meant a lot of investment early on. This puts a large burden on the trustees to either give money themselves, or to raise large sums for SSE. They all come from the business background; they were involved with the business school, so perhaps one could argue that the trustees are still debating amongst themselves whether SSE is a good idea or not.  Or, at least a group among them feels that science can be real money drain with no short-term payoff, and I am sure this remains a subject of hot debate.

Administratively, the main issue is that of leadership. To run SSE, you need excellent leaders with great breadth of knowledge and experience in science research and teaching. The leaders must gain the trust and the respect of faculty, parents, students, and even government officials, because they have to interface with the government to get accreditation, funding, etc. They must also have the respect and credibility in the Pakistani academic community so that they can talk to their counterparts in other universities to show that SSE respects other institutions and wishes to bring everyone together as a community for mutual uplift. You need people at the top who do that job of being ambassadors and who really believe in it. But finding such leaders in Pakistan is very hard.

STEP: Just hard or impossible, at this point?

AA: It may be impossible.

STEP: Can’t you develop processes so that personalities become less relevant?

AA: I think it’s really hard to have well-impacted processes defined in fledgling institutions. There is just a lot of ad hoc stuff that you must do, and there is no precedence for what you may be trying to do. You can’t expect someone to come in and put in every conceivable process; it doesn’t work that way.  In new institutions, in my experience, you have to ‘wing it’, you have to improvise and much more importantly, you have to run it on enthusiasm more than on processes.  If the enthusiasm isn’t there at the beginning, people will just feel so fearful of their small numbers and the huge task ahead that they will slowly withdraw. So, you have to pump up a lot of enthusiasm in people; processes emerge in due course. This is why good leadership with relevant experience is important.

STEP: So, then, how can SSE make sure that it remains a strong institution without the kind of leadership you described?

AA: I think they have to become largely leader-independent. The faculty at LUMS is, on the whole, very sensible and mature. Their collective wisdom has to drive the institution, pretty much independent of who is at the top.  For example, if anyone sees a little conflagration coming up, it should be everybody’s business at LUMS to diffuse it.  That’s the only way to survive and I think there is some of that sense of ownership now developing. I think SSE’s Computer Science group, being large and having survived some adversities in the past, can point the way and say to the newly formed groups, ‘look, these little disputes or fears’ — and, by the way, all fighting within universities is over the most trivial of things  –  ‘have no basis and let’s remain focused on our bigger agenda’.

It takes a certain maturity and I worked pretty hard with the faculty to try to make them feel that as a group, as a collective decision-making body, they are very strong and that they can draw upon the traditions of LUMS — of resilience, improvement and excellence – and march on. I said to the faculty: name me the last three presidents of, say, Harvard University or some other famous university?  You won’t know them because they are in the background; what’s in the forefront is the faculty. I think they understand pretty well the need for this communal sense and shared responsibility. 

You see, Pakistani institutions are very fragile. Whether it’s a hospital or a charitable organization, they can fall apart when the right person walks away or dies or whatever.  Everything just hangs on a thread. We have to get beyond this; I mean, will the Edhi trust survive Edhi?

It shouldn’t be like that. Pakistan should take pride in its good institutions. People should say: here is an institution worth saving and we want it to get better next year, not worse. Those inside the institution should commit themselves; those outside it, the same. Parents should say, we want LUMS to get better regardless of who is it at the top, or whether its funds run out, because SSE is giving our children an opportunity we didn’t imagine was possible in Pakistan. People should say, look, of all the places in Pakistan doing science and engineering teaching and research, you guys are doing an excellent job, you must continue to do that; we are counting on it! That’s the kind of sentiment it takes to sustain an institution like the SSE.  But we have to be a little more mature as a society and understand that that’s how countries preserve their institutions. It takes a lot to keep these valuable things going.

STEP: But, a few years ago, a number of faculty members (around five) left LUMS. Do you feel that it has happened for the last time?

AA: I do not know all details, but I do have some idea of the problems that caused the departure. Basically, it was problems festering that were not tended to in time. When problems fester, they just get messier and messier. That is when leaders should step in and defuse the crises. But, I think these are inevitable growing pains in a Pakistani institution.

The important thing is that it should never happen again … because once is enough. This is why when I was at LUMS I told everybody to look at the mistakes of the past and pledge not to let them happen again… for the sake of the institution.  I very much hope that it was the last mass departure, because if the institution starts to hemorrhage its faculty, even if it loses just one or two people, things can unravel very quickly. And, that’s what I think everyone has to be on-guard for.

STEP: Final question on this topic of SSE: what is your advice to the people at LUMS?

AA: My message to the faculty at SSE is: you are the force, you are the institution. You are experienced, you are teaching at a world class university, you are doing great research in Pakistan, you just need to pull together and say, this is our institution, this is what we are fighting for and this is what we are building it for. You are the one who define this institution, and you will continue to bring fame to it. You are at the front-line, delivering a powerful tool (or, should I say, weapon) to the best of Pakistani youth to build a better future: a high quality, liberalizing, deep, higher education.

In part two of our conversation with Dr. Abidi, we talk about funding for higher education — can the current levels be sustained and why the industry is not investing more — and what Pakistanis abroad can do to help. So, stay tuned!

“Heinz [College at the CMU campus in] Australia began to notice a growing population of Pakistani students in its Master’s programs and that they were some of the best and brightest of their overall class.  This was supported by anecdotal evidence both in Pittsburgh and Doha and we decided to, as we say in the states, ‘check this out’,” said Bryan Tamburro, Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives at CMU, who visited Pakistan last month with Prof. Chuck Thorpe, the outgoing Dean of CMU Qatar. “I believe this growing population of top talent from Pakistan is a direct result of HEC’s efforts to increase Pakistan’s capacity to deliver world class quality higher education to its college age population (17-25).”

Bryan and Chuck visited the campuses of NUST, COMSATS, GIKI, NDU and met with the rector of IBA Karachi in Islamabad. They were impressed by the state of affairs of higher education in Pakistan, particularly in contrast to other countries in South Asia. During the trip, Bryan and Chuck also met Dr. Ata-ur-Rehman, former Chairman of the HEC, Dr. Khurram Afridi, Project Director of the LUMS SSE, and with Dr. Sohail Naqvi, the Executive Director of the HEC.

Bryan said that, given his experiences throughout South Asia over the past twelve years, he had tempered expectations for what they would experience in Pakistan. But, he was pleasantly surprised by what they found after their visit. “I was wrong! I believe that the HEC, through nationalizing the accreditation process of Higher Education for Pakistan, has made significant progress in addressing the nation’s capacity issue, while strengthening facilities and with an incredible focus on faculty development, is succeeding where many other ‘developing nations’ are failing.”

He went on to say, “[s]imply put, you can erect a building on campus but the building doesn’t educate the student the faculty member does and that, for some reason, is the one thing strangely missing in many nations efforts to build quality higher education. This is the significant accomplishment of the HEC that helps separate Pakistan from other nations.”

Currently, administrators at CMU are considering avenues of sustainable collaboration with various Pakistani Institutions. Carnegie Mellon currently has presence in a number of countries, including Qatar, Portugal, Japan, Australia, and Cyprus, offering graduate and undergraduate courses.

Editor’s note: We previously reported that the visitors met with Prime Minister Gillani. While they were scheduled to meet, the meeting was canceled due to the Prime Minister’s scheduling conflicts.

“We argue instead that educational attainment and higher income increase political dissatisfaction, such as dissatisfaction with one’s government or foreign policy, when holding all other factors constant. We also argue that politically dissatisfied men and women are more sympathetic to suicide bombings.”

Their study is based on data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project. The following question from the survey was used:

Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets [in our country] are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. Other people believe that, no matter what the reason, this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?

Slightly over half of the Pakistani (50.4%) respondents to the survey never consider suicide bombings of civilians justified, and, somewhat surprisingly, 60.4% think that  suicide bombings of Westerners in Iraq are never justified. When broken down according to educational attainment, the percentage of Pakistanis who believe suicide bombings are never justified against civilians are: 43.7% of Pakistanis with below primary education, 54.4% of Pakistanis with primary education, 56.6% of Pakistanis with secondary education, and 63.4% of Pakistanis with higher education. A similar negative correlation is seen between wealth and support of suicide bombing.

With respect to Pakistan, the authors conclude:

“The basic and extended models … offer no statistical evidence that educational attainment matters. The extended model provides some evidence that compared to the poorest respondents, upper-middle income respondents in Pakistan are less likely to support suicide bombing against Westerns in Iraq.”

and that,

“Respondents in Pakistan with primary education are more likely to be politically dissatisfied than those without primary education.”

Despite the lack of consistent indicators that span the Muslim public, the study concludes with two broad policy recommendations.

1. The first recommendation is to continue the expansion of ‘peace’ education. They note: “The purpose of such education would not be to reduce political grievances that can be very real but to suggest other ways to bring about change that cause less suffering and damage to society… This, however, may be too much to ask from some of the more oppressive regimes and the narrow elites that lead them.”
2. The second recommendation is somewhat less well defined: “The present dissatisfaction … can be reduced if governments of Muslim countries, U.S., and other Western states adopt policies that respect the dignity, welfare, interests, and lives of Muslims everywhere”. They recommend taking steps to reduce political dissatisfaction, such as supporting trade, economic integration, and cooperative international security.

This is supported by theory with successful case studies and field evidence from around the globe. However, little attention and application has been advanced in Pakistan. In many ways, we remain stuck with the business model of the industrialized century: hide, confine, and protect knowledge to self, whether in the form of an organization or person.

Unfortunately, the internet will not allow this model to flourish for too long. Its inherent features of freedom, equality, and access provide new opportunities tailored to knowledge sharing, openness, and empowerment. Pakistan on the other hand has yet to face the realities of the internet dominant world, therefore protection still flourishes. This is due to the limited use and access of the internet to the public, catering only to a small fraction of the population base. But growth in usage and eventual overturn is inevitable.

The concept of learning through informal and open exchange is not new, it has existed throughout history but the integrated, accessible, and connected world has enhanced its coverage, scope, and influence over a wider audience. For example, it has been widely documented that clustered organizations outperform scattered ones, whether it is academia or any other industry. One of the core reasons for this is the spillover feature that interaction and social presence of firms and people is able to create, referred to as ‘untraded interdependencies’ by Steven Pinch and Nick Henry [1]. This is probably the most natural, indigenous, and localized form of learning to have existed over time, where people learn with and from one another. Its pedagogy may differ per region but the essence of interaction remains the same.

Similarly, open and integrated spaces are overtaking the old wave of cubicle, closed door and isolated office spaces. In Pakistan, we are still confined to the box. We need to take a leap and step outside our box of comfort — and our traditional business parameters.

Motor Sport

Let’s consider the success of ‘Formula 1’ as a learning experience. The culture is predominantly based on collaborative forms of learning and competition — an underlying condition to generate a degree of competitive balance between teams. Healthy competition is necessary to attract crowds — with financial benefit to the industry. This is a subtle feature that a one-sided outcome would not achieve. Although teasing to the traditional mind, competitive balance cannot be acquired through pure confinement and minimal exchange, as learning and new knowledge is regularly shared to maintain a degree of competition in the industry. Moreover, knowledge generation itself is a cumulative outcome of exchange between diverse viewpoints and cannot be optimized in isolation. In [5], Steven Pinch and Nick Henry show that minimal learning is attained through formal exchange in conferences or industry wide journals; passive at most. Active forms of learning are through physical presence in the pit stop, employee turnover, and social interaction.

Bill Taylor [2] of the Practically Radical says ‘the only sustainable form of market leadership is thought leadership…the most powerful way to demonstrate your position as a thought leader is to teach other organizations what you know — whether they are customers, suppliers, or even direct competitors’.

According to Dr Kaplan of Virgin Mason, ‘the more we educate, the faster we move as well.. By teaching others what we’ve learned, it forces us to keep learning’. The approach ‘is not to out-market the competition, but to out-teach the competition. Why? Because teaching creates a different kind of presence in the marketplace. It creates a higher sense of loyalty among those who learn from you. And it helps the company create not just customers for its products but an audience for its ideas — in the same way that famous chefs are willing to share their recipes so as to build a following for their overall approach to cooking’ says Bill Taylor.

Innovation and Technology

A major feature underlining Google’s creative and social success lies in its ability to respond to market need and create a new business model. The company predominantly relies on creating an environment fostering creativity through collaboration, interactivity, empowerment, and sharing rather than protection and storage of learning between few. In Pakistan, our mental and social colonization, under-utilization of capacity, and minimal pursuit of continuous learning, stemming from our education system — which does not seed features of lifelong learning along with other cultural factors — are probably some of the reasons underlying our attachment to the business model of the 20^th century.

Is lack of research a cause of our inability to innovate? At best, it is the surface of the cause and an outcome of the approach and mind set.

Is lack of human capital the cause? Not really: most potential does not attain its due worth. Most of the brightest graduates aim at attaining middle management jobs at multinationals — a core feature of structural dependency of the economy. There are various companies in Pakistan which are constrained by mindset rather than their ability or acumen — inevitably influencing the human capital it retains — putting in place a vicious cycle between cause and effect. These companies need to feel self confident — invest, cultivate, and subsequently envision human resource as their capital.

After all, the DVD as a product technology was created in the industrialized world, but was eventually replicated and mass production took off in the developing world. This did not mean that the industrialized world lost its power, infact it gained on the contrary, as the dependency on the industrialized world ‘to create’ further increased.

Academia and Research

The London School of Economics shares its public lecturers locally (in session) and internationally for free. This does not mean that the School is losing its market power or competitive edge. In fact the opposite is true. It is a tool used to create social power, generating the ‘wow factor’, and instilling a strong desire among students to be part of the process, another reminder of the knowledge driven future. Open Course Ware at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the recent advancement of Professor Sandel (Harvard University) to television underlines the case. The internet has changed the parameters of competitive edge in business.

Successful academia has started using knowledge to create tacit power, utilizing it as a tool to market and attract students — if you constrain exchange and dissemination, the internet will outpace you — use it before you become redundant.

The competitive edge of a university is maintained through the interactivity between students and faculty in and outside the classroom, the social, intellectual, and economic opportunities it provides, the presence of diverse viewpoints and mindset, and most of all the ‘chaos’ — creating avenues for ideas, learning, and breakthroughs.

An interesting example exists on how research is shared and disseminated. International firms such as Mc Kinsey and Company, Price Water Coopers, and Boston Consulting Group share some ideas, publications and analysis with the public for free (readily available on their website), utilizing it as a form of tacit marketing strategy. You would not find such information on most corporate websites in Pakistan. Similarly, universities and broadly faculty share and upload their publications and research articles online for free view. This reflects a social and intellectual mindset gaining precedence and force in the new generation of learning, a feature you would not find on websites of most organizations in Pakistan including many universities and research organization.

As the modern models of exchange evolve, thought leadership is social leadership, which reinforces economic and political leadership. Business models need to respond to changing times –– the year 2010 is much different from the year 2000. We need to envision the use of the new approach in Pakistan; take the step forward and overcome the innate fear. Lead and benefit, as many still remain plugged to the old business model.

The opportunity is there, and the dividends are for the taking. A wise man once said ‘the timing of decision is more important than the accuracy of choice’. The time is now!

Ali Sohail is an economist with a postgraduate focus in local economic development from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is currently working on the development and launch of an interdisciplinary university in Karachi. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of STEP.

References

[1] Pinch and Henry (1998) Paul Krugman’s Geographical Economics, Industrial Clustering and the British Motor Sport Industry, Regional Studies, Vol. 33.9, pp. 815-827.

[2] Bill Taylor (2009) The Teaching Organization, Practically Radical, Harvard Business Publishing http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/taylor/2009/11/companies_with_class_the_rise.html

[3] Cohen (2009) Morals Class in Starting: Please Pass the Popcorn, The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/arts/television/26sandel.html

[4] Michael Todaro and Stephen Smith (2003) Economic Development, Eight Edition, Pearson Education Limited

[5] Pinch and Henry (1998) Paul Krugman’s Geographical Economics, Industrial Clustering and the British Motor Sport Industry, Regional Studies, Vol. 33.9, pp. 815-827.

[6] Porter, M.E. (1998). On Competition. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

[7] Porter, M.E. (1990). The Competitive Advantage of Nations. London, Macmillan.

We posed these and some other questions to Sara Chak, a Developmental Therapist working in the Developmental Pediatrics Department at the Children’s Hospital, Lahore. Sara has a Masters in Special Education from Punjab University and has been working with special children for the last six years. Currently, she works with the parents or guardians of children with special needs.

STEP:The Special Education system relies on the detection of disabilities in infants and young children. In Pakistan, how advanced is the system of detection of disabilities which would lead a child to be described as having special needs?

Sara Chak: Most disabilities such as Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, bone defects, and epilepsy are identified at birth and most hospitals in Pakistan currently have an advanced system of assessing newborns for these conditions. Some disabilities, such as visual and hearing impairments, are diagnosed later on in the child’s life, but again the pediatric departments of most hospitals have the resources to perform tests to diagnose these disabilities. The problem, of course, lies in the fact that most children in Pakistan, are not born in hospitals. Traditional midwives are unable to assess newborns for theses disabilities and thus their detection is delayed, sometimes indefinitely.
One area of assessment where Pakistan lags behind is the psychological testing of those with visual or hearing impairments. Currently no institution in Pakistan currently provides tests for the intellectual assessment of these students, which hinders the academic progress of these children.

STEP: What is the next step taken once a child with special needs has been identified?

SC: This depends on the institution the child is taken to by his or her guardians and the recommendations of those they consult, usually the doctor who diagnosed the disability. Here at the Children’s hospital we have two learning centers: the two-hour learning center and the four-hour learning center. The two-hour learning center is mostly for children under the age of five, where each child is taught on a one-on-one basis. Apart from teaching the child, the teacher focuses on preparing the child to work in a group environment. In the four hour learning center, group teaching sessions take place everyday. These are continued as long as we feel that the child is benefiting from them. Once we feel that the child has reached his or her learning potential, we guide him/her through an occupational placement program. In this process, we help the child figure out a skill he or she would like to learn and one which we think the child is capable of doing. We refer him/her to vocational training institutes for people with special needs. Thus our aim is to make him/her an independent member of the society.

STEP: What kinds of jobs do these children usually end up with?

SC: All kinds. Traditionally, they went to vocational training centers to learn embroidery, woodwork, etc. But, recently two of my students trained to work at fast food restaurants and are currently working as part of the service staff at these restaurants.

STEP:Which other institutions are currently providing Special Education?

SC: Currently there is mixture of institutions. There are government-run institutions, non-governmental charity organizations, and private institutions. But the number of such institutions is not enough to cater to the demand. And these institutions are usually concentrated in the urban centers of Pakistan.

STEP:What major changes do you think are required in the Special Education sector?

SC: Firstly, I think the training of special education teachers needs to be altered. Currently in Pakistan the only degree offered in Special Education is a Masters degree. No other degree or diploma even has Special Education in its syllabus. In my opinion, Special Education should be introduced as a subject as early as possible. In other countries it is offered as a high-school level subject. For example, Special Education is an O-Level subject but this is not offered to students in Pakistan. The B.Ed degree that most teachers have should certainly require that the holder have some training in dealing with special children. A two-year course is not enough for a person to learn the intricacies of dealing with these children and making special education part of the B.Ed degree would increase the pool of teachers available to teach at Special Education institutions. In fact, if the society as a whole is to learn to accept and include those with special needs, we need to introduce the concept of special needs to children at a primary or secondary school level.

The Masters degree itself needs to be extended to a three year program and should include a year long mandatory internship. Currently, this internship is only a few months long and in my opinion this just isn’t enough. Teaching Special children is a skill best learned in an actual school, and thus greater on-field experience is needed to improve the quality of the graduates.

Secondly the institutions themselves need some changes in the way they are run. It is sad to see when the government offers excellent resources for Special Education but nobody knows how to use them. An example of this is the automatic Braille translation machine. Many institutions have them but they are not being used to their maximum potential. While they could be used to automatically translate large amounts of important material, very few people know how to use them leading them to be used marginally for manually translating text. Teachers are not taught how to operate them, it is a mechanics job to do so. Thus either teachers should be trained how to use these resources or trained personnel should be available to them.

Teachers themselves should pass through a vigorous screening procedure. Due to the mentioned lack of training in special education, most teachers in these schools have no experience or qualifications in teaching Special Children. Thus they have very little knowledge of their physical, psychological, or emotional needs. Another change which is happening on a global level but will take time to be implemented in Pakistan is the elimination of Special Education institutions altogether. Mainstreaming has almost completely replaced Special Education institutions in the developed world. Laws are in place which allow no school to reject a student on the basis of a disability. This way every school has to be prepared to handle a child with special needs. The structure of the schools needs to be such that allows special children to maneuver easily, they have teachers trained to deal with these children and other resources such as special computers and books are available in all schools. The idea of isolating these children is no longer morally or socially acceptable.

STEP: Could you elaborate on the concept of mainstreaming. Has this been adopted by schools in Pakistan?

SC: Mainstreaming defies the idea that children with special needs need to be segregated from other children. There are many benefits that come with doing this. First of all the special child does not feel isolated from the society. This makes it easier for them to become contributing members of the society. By segregating these children we only encourage their role as social outcasts. At this point, some private schools do admit children with special needs but in my experience, the facilities they have are far from satisfactory. They usually allocate a separate room for these children which nullifies the purpose of mainstreaming altogether.

STEP: An advantage of mainstreaming would be the wider acceptance of people with physical or mental disabilities in society. How far do you think the lack of this acceptance is a problem currently?

SC: This is a huge problem in Pakistan. As a therapist, I deal with special children everyday who are intentionally or unintentionally hurt by strangers, peers, and even their own family members. For example, those with visual or hearing impairments are often dealt with as if they have a mental disability, hampering their academic and social development. Even family members are guilty of ridiculing these children. A common example is that of children with Down Syndrome. They are often highly excited by music and can’t help moving enthusiastically when music is played. Family members will use this “trick” to entertain themselves and play music at odd times knowing the child will not be able to restrain himself from dancing. This ridicule has deep repercussions on the child’s development. We need to become mature as a society and learn how to deal with those with special needs in an accepting and respectful manner.

STEP:What are the opportunities available to people with special needs in higher education?

SC: Most universities do not discriminate against applicants because of their disabilities. I know for a fact that there are students with disabilities studying in GCU and FC College. But the number of such students is few. You have to understand that even though there are opportunities available to students to gain higher education, very few have access to good quality primary and secondary education which would make them eligible for higher education.

STEP: Ending on a positive note, could you mention some of the success stories of Special Education in Pakistan?

SC: A major positive step taken by the Musharraf government was to open the CSS examinations to those with special needs. They were allowed assistance in the examination and thus the civil service has now been opened to these people. This is a major step in the right direction since it proves that with the right assistance, those with special needs can be as contributing members of society as those without.

Rising Sun Institute, LRBT, Children’s Hospital are examples of special education institutes that are making a difference. STEP would like to laud their efforts and encourage readers to contribute to institutions like these which are providing education and training to those with special needs in any way they can.

STEP: Informed, perhaps, by your experiences as a student at MIT during the Vietnam War, you have spoken in favor of re-establishing student unions in Pakistani Universities. Could you briefly make the case for re-instituting student unions in Pakistan?

PH: Meaningful discussions on social, cultural, and political issues must be brought back to campuses. Young people are idealists; in fact, there is no other way for them unless they are brain dead. They naturally dream of what a good society is; a society that is way better than what they have inherited from their elders. So, it is perfectly healthy for students to have a self-image of being agents for positive change. Once aware, they soon realize that individuals count for little — only organized actions do. But organized actions require a culture of civilized debate. In my 36 years of teaching at Quaid-e-Azam University, I have never felt that rational, civilized debate with or between students is impossible. Of course, there have been exceptional situations, such as after the 1998 nuclear tests, but students will generally listen to the other side in a civilized way.

We must have faith in the young, educated people of our society. This is why I strongly feel that student unions must be restored, and student representatives be elected by popular vote. How else can Pakistan generate its next generation of political leaders? Are we forever doomed to being ruled by military usurpers and dynastic rulers? No, we must believe in ourselves.

I’m not asking for something far out, something that has never existed. Even under the British Raj, there were student unions. So, why not now? In the early 1970’s, which is when I had just begun teaching, all Pakistani universities had student unions. On the one hand there was the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba and other far right-wing organizations. They were pitted against an assorted range of left and liberal organizations: the National Students Federation, Democratic Students Federation, Peoples Students Federation, etc. Sure, there were occasional physical clashes, but it was still healthy in the sense that battles were fought primarily in the realm of ideas. This kind of fighting was infinitely better than fighting the senseless ethnic and religious wars of today.

I know that some people feel that our students are fundamentally incapable of responsible behavior. In my opinion, this amounts to a condemnation of Pakistan itself. If students in India can successfully study and become world-renowned professionals, as well as unionize and fully engage in national and international political issues, then surely Pakistani students can do this just as well. Else, let’s be prepared to declare Pakistan a grand failure, a bad idea to begin with, and our people stupid and irrational. I do not accept this terrible conclusion.

STEP: What realistic measures could be taken to prevent student unions from devolving once again into quasi-militant organizations responsible for violence and intimidation instead of political debate and activism?

PH: I would begin cautiously lest the whole idea of restoration flops. Although all unions remain banned, religious extremists still rule many Pakistani campuses. They will surely try to take advantage of the new opportunities offered if the ban is lifted, and will want to impose their extreme views upon the rest of the student body. Also, let’s not forget that political parties like the PPP were less than responsible in the 1970’s. They also violated laws and ethical responsibilities to gain power just as much as the Islamists. So, there must be a clear code of ethics that specifically abjures physical violence, and specifies immediate penalties, including immediate expulsion of students if these are violated by whoever is responsible, irrespective of political orientation. I know it is difficult, but the reinstatement of unions, subject to their elected leaders making a solemn pledge to uphold specified rules is the only way forward towards creating a culture of debate and tolerance on campus. Ultimately, the voices of reason will become loud enough to be heard. Before a full restoration, the government should allow and encourage limited activities such as disaster relief activities, community work, science popularization by students, etc. But this first step must not be the last one, and we must move as rapidly as circumstances allow.

STEP: As a result, perhaps, of stifling university campuses, creativity and innovation are not valued personal traits in Pakistani society, even in urban centers. Do you believe there is a case for creating an ‘HEC for the Arts’, that cultivates and funds literature and the arts in Pakistan? What measures can be taken to change attitudes towards creative individuals and their ideas?

PH: Literature, art, music, and sculpture are forms of creative expression. If you want them then you must first fight the battle for political, cultural, and personal freedom. Without this freedom, all the money in the world and the finest building for a “HEC for the Arts”, will achieve exactly nothing. The starting point is to acknowledge that we actually want the Arts.

Presently, it is not clear that anything beyond narrowly technical education is desirable or socially sanctioned. Unlike during the earlier years of Pakistan, today we see that film, drama, dance, and music are frowned upon within the campuses of most public universities. Joyous or artistic expressions are sometimes attacked by student vigilantes who say these violate religious norms. At Punjab University, the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba staged violent protests against the establishment of a department of musicology. Even when something low-key was finally established, it had to be located away from the main campus.

Burqa and hijab are ubiquitous, cafeterias are segregated, males and females are not allowed to walk together, and Islamic morality squads enforce these restrictions with due fervor. I cannot see the faces of most of my female students today.

There is no strong Jamiat in my university, but the Saudiized culture is not too different from Punjab University. Indeed, I would contend that we are witnessing a broad social phenomenon that is no longer linked to specific political initiatives as they were in the past. An example: in the physics department of Quaid-e-Azam University we started a film club some time ago. The first movie was A Beautiful Mind, a PG-13 rated story of Princeton mathematician John Nash. It’s a marvelous story of this psychologically disturbed genius. But half-way through, some fanatical students disrupted it and turned off the electricity. The following day there were posters up across the university accusing me, as the physics department chairman, of screening pornographic movies and importing western culture! It was ordinary middle-class students doing it without the Jamiat behind them.

In a landscape that is generally pretty dank and dark, there are a few bright spots. The times that I have been to the National College of Arts in Lahore, and the Indus Valley School of Arts and Architecture in Karachi, I was impressed by the vitality of students and the open atmosphere. Their work looked rather good to my untutored eye. The ambiance there reminded me of my visit to Indian universities a few years ago. Perhaps openness is the key to their success. More generally, ambiance really does matter in determining the quality of a college or university, even if it does not specifically relate to the liberal arts because learning has to be taken in a broader sense than mere book-learning. Personal freedom is crucial to creating a well-rounded individual. It is particularly important to learn to deal with colleagues of the opposite sex in a mature way. This is a necessary part of the maturation process for homosapiens.

STEP: In the past, you have written about the tension between Islam and Science, particularly the lack of scientific maturity among university students. As a university professor, you are guaranteed a captive audience of young impressionable people, mature enough to understand the implications of the scientific method. Rather than blame ideologues for succeeding to capture an intellectual vacuum, would you concede instead that the scientific intelligentsia, including university academics, are simply failing to articulate the “idea-system” of science to university students?

PH: Yes, university academics in Pakistan have failed to create a scientific culture and mindset. They, like most school and college teachers, are indeed guilty. Except for the honorable few, most consider scientific thinking an alien, imported, western concept. Sadly, those who are paid to teach science know next to nothing about the scientific method, the premises which underlie science, or its history. This also holds for the majority of teachers who hold PhDs from our universities. In fact many — whether actively or implicitly — work against the idea system of science.

In my opinion, the scientific mind is nothing but the questioning mind. It starts to develop naturally when students encounter questions that engage the brain’s reasoning and logical capabilities rather than memory capacity. To nurture it, teachers need to raise such questions as: How do we know? What is important to measure? How do we check the correctness of measurements? What is the evidence? How do you make sense out of your results? Is there a counter explanation, or perhaps a simpler one? The aim should be to get students into the habit of posing such questions and framing answers.

The barrenness of academia is painfully apparent. Anyone who has studied or taught in the Pakistani system (O-A levels and elite private universities excluded) knows that our teachers are guaranteed a captive audience of students who hang on to every scribble made upon the blackboard, or every sentence read out from the teacher’s notes. Students who ask questions are frowned upon and risk being branded as trouble makers. To get good grades, examinees need only reproduce this undigested, or partially digested, information. No surprise: this is exactly the way the teachers were educated themselves and what formed their worldview.

The impact of rigid obedience on science education is fatal. I have often seen science being taught in schools as though it was Islamiat – as something that exists in its final, complete, and ultimate form. Rote memorization dominates even in my university, which is supposed to be Pakistan’s best public university. Science teaching is reduced to an absurdity and is nothing but a waste of time because the essence is lost.

A sorry anecdote: as departmental chairman, I decided to monitor the teaching practices of an assistant professor in my department about whom students had frequently complained to me in private. So I sat in one of his classes and found that he jumped from formula to formula with no connection between them. Later, I summoned him to my office and demanded an explanation for the intermediate steps. His answer: this formula and that formula are in the prescribed M.Sc-level plasma physics textbook on page so-and-so.  He could not even understand why I was horrified. I tried to tell him that physics depends on a chain of logical connections, not the authority of the textbook. Step 1 leads to step 2, and so forth. Sadly, I did not see my horror reflected in my colleagues. So my efforts to remove this teacher have failed thus far. He has been receiving a full salary for the last two and a half years although I do not allow him to teach a course in my department.

Why is the system increasingly totally rote-oriented and anti-questioning? There may be deeper reasons, but one obvious reason is lack of subject competence: teachers can only dare to invite questions from students if they know all the answers, or at least most of them. This requires having a solid understanding of the material you are teaching. If you have insufficient mastery over a subject, then obviously you don’t want your ignorance exposed. So, even if teachers agree in principle that students should ask questions, the mixture of intellectual laziness and incompetence is usually too heavy to cast off. Nevertheless, while the competence deficit is a difficult problem to fix, it is solvable. Better books, examinations, and evaluation criteria can produce more competent teachers who would then emphasize internalization of knowledge over rote learning. For this there has to be a strong will.

STEP: Rote memorization is a ubiquitous feature in the education systems of most developing countries, like China, North Korea, India, and Singapore; none of these are Muslim-majority countries. Why do you feel the problem of rote learning is more closely correlated with religion than economic development in Pakistan?

PH: Traditional, culturally-driven, societies rely upon inherited knowledge and think of it as a fixed corpus of facts. Teachers are supposed to transmit the “truth” as determined by some unapproachable authority. To that extent, science and traditional learning do not get along well. Joseph Needham’s marvelous treatise on Chinese science exposes this point in great detail. But the countries you named – with North Korea probably excluded – have been undergoing a massive cultural and social transformation over the decades. They are rapidly modernizing their values and ways of behavior. Not all the changes are good, of course, but the fact is that they are moving towards a way of thinking that is eminently suited for good, science-based education. Hence their excellent technical universities and high educational standards.

It’s a different matter in strongly religiously-driven societies such as ours. Fixity and rigidity are much more ingrained, the resistance to modernity much fiercer. This directly impacts pedagogy. The teaching of religion is necessarily authoritarian because religious knowledge is final, total, and unalterable — it all comes from God up above. If this attitude remained confined to Islamiat, it wouldn’t be a problem. But one inevitable by-product is that the reverential concept of knowledge filters all the way down into science subjects and their teaching. The notion of “up above” becomes fluid and extends into textbooks and teachers, which lie almost beyond challenge.

I think that obedience to “the hand above” is paralyzing because science simply does not accept anything that lies outside of logic, mathematics, and observation. In fact, intellectual timidity critically underlies the failure of science in Islam for the last 700-800 years. This young man in my department who I referred to above is just one of the millions from General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamized generation. They are steeped in the notion of textual authority — the Book is always right even if it is a textbook!

The scientific mindset and orthodox belief (as we have it today in Pakistan) are mutually exclusive. Take your pick, you just can’t have both. Please note that I am not extending this to science and faith in general; compromises have been worked out in different places at different times. Muslims and science got along famously for a good 400-500 years. But I am fairly certain that with present attitudes to life and knowledge, all the world’s laboratory equipment, computers, fast internet connections, and books won’t move us an inch towards genuine science. Like the Saudis, we are doomed to be mere consumers of knowledge and its myriad products. I don’t see this changing any time soon.

STEP: With the extreme scarcity of “scientifically-literate” teachers, the hiring of sub-standard faculty, like the one you mention, seems necessary and inevitable. In the present climate, how can the hiring processes at universities be reformed to prevent incompetent faculty from joining?

PH: Before hiring faculty in any university, a test to check subject basics is absolutely essential even if the applicant has a PhD. It should be a national policy that applicants at the lecturer and assistant professor level should obtain more than a prescribed number of marks in a centrally set and administered subject test of high reliability. This test should be used only in a pass/fail mode — the final selection should take into account the usual criteria (publications, performance in a trial public lecture, etc). But subject literacy should absolutely be the first criterion, not publication quantity. At the associate or full professorship, a public lecture must be made compulsory.

I am aware that implementing this is not easy. First, very few science departments have faculty who can make good tests and grade them. This means that one should rely on GRE exams, which lie beyond petty corruption but have some known disadvantages as well. Second, there will be stiff resistance from applicants to pass any kind of test. They will argue that a PhD is more than enough to qualify. They frequently invoke the “ghairat” argument, and accuse proponents of testing as “foreign agents”. However their ignorance rapidly emerges once they are challenged to answer any question outside some very narrow domain.

STEP: In the final mix, is it better to have poor faculty or no faculty at all?

PH: That’s a really tough question! A miniscule proportion of the eligible population has access to higher education, about 4%. One wants greater enrollment but clearly somewhere one has to put a lower bound on quality. So, for example, there’s no point in having a department of English if the head of department can’t speak or write a straight sentence of English. In some colleges that’s actually the case. Ditto for literacy in the sciences.

Maybe it would be helpful to have different grades of universities and colleges. So grade-I would do both teaching and research, grade-II would do only teaching. Finer differentiation could also be done. But at some point one has to simply say: no, this is worthless! Let’s not pretend that we’re offering “higher education”.

STEP: Finally, are there any trends you see in Pakistan today that offer the promise of a better tomorrow for science and education?

PH: If one looks hard, it is possible to point to some good things that are happening. First, there is increasing realization that local testing and examination standards have collapsed to the point that they have lost meaning. This is forcing us to confront reality – which is absolutely vital for reform.

An example: the HEC has made GRE subject tests mandatory for the award of a PhD degree from every public university. Of course, the passing mark is ludicrously low (40 percentile) and most students can’t make even the low grade. But their performance is steadily improving. About 15 students from my department have cleared this hurdle, and the best has scored 80 percentile. Much more importantly, our students are being confronted head-on with a hard fact: science is about problem solving and they will have to shape up if they want to play ball. The fact that they can’t cheat or cram is doing a huge amount of good.

Another positive development: there are universities that are seriously developing science faculties of high quality. The LUMS School of Science and Engineering has already taken off. Given how much effort it has put into faculty recruitment, this must be considered a flagship effort. If it succeeds — and the odds are that it will — we shall actually have a model for other efforts.

But let’s not fool ourselves. Pakistani higher education will turn around when Pakistan turns around. This can’t happen while our cities, towns, army, and police are attacked by maniacal terrorists day after day. Expatriate Pakistanis, as well as others of high academic accomplishment, are vital to the uplift of our universities and colleges. In these circumstances they do not feel safe enough to work in Pakistan.  Without winning peace, the country will just continue to stagger along.

Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy is head of the Physics Department at Quaid-e-Azam University and a prominent social activist in Pakistan.

My contention is regarding the purpose of promoting university research in Pakistan. Surely, it cannot be only to solve pressing current socio-economic problems of Pakistan. If that were so, a much better approach, in purely economic terms, would be to setup a few research centers (like the National Labs of United States or centers like KRL, NESCOM, etc.) that hire highly-qualified people to lead a few groups in identified focus areas. These groups can hire local graduate and under-graduate students for thematic research. Moreover, many of the most pressing technological issues facing Pakistan do not need cutting-edge or new research. Many of the problems with our power-, gas- and water-infrastructure have well-known solutions. Even many of the most basic military requirements can be solved locally if proper governmental policies (local business subsidies, tax-breaks, transparency) are implemented, allowing existing technologies to be developed by indigenous companies. Indeed, Pakistan already has companies with the engineering capabilities needed to solve many of our problems. As two examples, Emerging Energy System and Integrated Dynamics can provide solutions in energy and military sectors, respectively. The barriers to such solutions are political, economic, and social, and thus outside the purview of this forum. But, it would be naïve to say that academia can overcome these barriers and deliver solutions to the common-man.  

So, what then is, or should be, the purpose of fostering academic research in Pakistan? On top of building a knowledge-based economy where entrepreneurship springs from academic efforts, there are three other, equally important, reasons to foster academic research.  First, developing and retaining a pool of intellectuals and academics that can enrich any debate and social discourse within the country, and also stop or reverse brain drain. Surely, you cannot have a robust higher education system without retaining and attracting the best.  Secondly, there are pedagogical benefits to inculcating research within universities. A research-active faculty remains up-to-date in their field, benefiting the students while also developing their research skills. Even more so, qualified academics tend to have greater exposure, and a different world view, which can be refreshing for the students, enriching them both personally and socially. Finally, by doing research at the cutting edge, academia can not only identify potential future problems, but also offer solutions when the need arises. As two examples, academic research seeded the development of Atomic bomb by the US in WWII and Britain’s cipher-breaking at Bletchley Park.  

Each of these purposes of fostering research in universities has a long-term and intrinsically unquantifiable benefit. Building a robust research ecosystem should be viewed in a manner similar to a country’s defense; neither has an immediate benefit to the man on the street, yet both are essential for prosperity and progress. 

Turning now to the core ingredient necessary to build and maintain an eco-system for research in universities: recent PhDs. A higher education system is like an automobile, with the policies, universities, and funding agencies the body and engine of the car, but the human resources (academics and students) are the essential fuel that runs the automobile. The more refined the fuel, the more smooth the running. I focus on the needs of young graduates for an important reason: fresh graduates that decide to return to Pakistan align their career prospective with that of their host university and, on a larger scale, with the academic profile of the country.  

However, it appears that the policies of universities and governments are not adequately addressing the need to attract the best and brightest young graduates. HEC has one program for placement of fresh PhDs, whereby eligible PhD’s are guaranteed placement in Pakistani universities for a PKR 80,000 salary. However, this program might paradoxically promote mediocrity, as the brightest returns would anyway be guaranteed placement in the top 5-6 universities in Pakistan.

I contend that while a good salary is a must, we cannot use salary as an incentive to lure and retain our best minds. The fresh graduates wanting to return to Pakistan do so of other-than-monetary motives (patriotism, youthful idealism, family, religion, etc.). In my discussion with recently graduated friends regarding their decision to return, having teaching and research freedom are their top two concerns. The first of these is largely affected by the openness of the universities while the second is related to the policies and constraints set by funding agencies.  

Academic freedom would mean the ability to innovate within their universities in terms of course content. Allowing new experimental courses not only introduces new areas to students but also piques their interest in those areas, potentially helping the faculty in research.  Research freedom means the ability to choose a research area of their choosing, perhaps close to their PhD area of expertise, allowing the use of their skill set developed during graduate research. 

Such research freedom can only be provided if these fresh PhDs are provided with initial, no-strings-attached, funding by either their universities of employment or funding agencies. One possible option would be to offer competitive awards, similar to the NSF CAREER awards, that provide seed-funding to new and aspiring faculty without requiring local or socially relevant research. These can be offered for 3-5 years, with renewal every year after the first two based on performance. Thereafter the research agenda is set by the agencies to shepherd research, in a manner similar to that suggested in Sohaib’s article. Another approach, quite forcefully argued in a DAWN article, would be to develop endowment funds at universities that allow them to support and attract the brightest fresh PhD’s.  

Forcing young PhDs to immediately focus on locally relevant research will in fact be counter-productive. As Sohaib’s article points out quite correctly, young faculty members need confidence and experience to do publishable research that also solves local problems. Another important aspect to consider for these fresh graduates is their remoteness from Pakistan during the 5-7 years of their higher education. Their grasp of local problems will only develop over time. Time is also needed to develop rapport with local researchers to do cross-disciplinary research, typical of a socially-relevant work, that needs collaboration. In fact, any good researcher will, over a period of time, attempt to address local problems even if it requires them to step out of their comfort zones.  

To summarize, while socially-relevant research should be one of the main goals for developing research infrastructure in universities it should be developed for other, equally important, purposes: attracting and retaining the best academics, providing up-to-date course contents, and preparing for unforeseen problems. Furthermore, for the research ecosystem to flourish it requires attracting and keeping the most brilliant minds within Pakistan. For this purpose the aspirations of these academics, and especially the recently graduated and returning PhDs, needs to be taken into account. Thus, a balance needs to be maintained through seeding constraint-free research by junior research faculty, mentoring them towards research benefiting the man-on-the street as their research experience matures.

 Affan Syed is a post doctoral research associate at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. His research focus is on systems research in terrestrial and underwater sensor networks.  He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National University of Science and Technology, Pakistan in 2000, and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering and PhD in Computer Science from University of Southern California in 2004, and 2009 respectively. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of STEP.