However, there is a third set of opinions about the Fund that also must be taken into account. For some of us, National ICT R&D Fund’s performance leaves much to be desired, though, it does not in any way lead to the conclusion that the fund must be dissolved or become irrelevant. In fact, it leads to quite the opposite conclusion, namely, that the Fund must be redesigned and reformed to ensure that it is able to deliver on its promise. That in its current form (and with its current focus) it is not designed to deliver the kind of innovation that the society expects from it and may in fact be duplicating the work of other agencies, such as the Higher Education Commission (HEC).

Failure to Deliver

When it began (initially as PTCL R&D Fund), the National ICT R&D Fund was a beacon of hope for those who wanted the ICT industry to flourish within the country. The unique and innovative mechanism through which the Fund was created and funded held endless possibilities for the future.  I, like so many others, also thought that National ICT R&D Fund’s example could be replicated elsewhere, to provide much needed and critical resources for research and innovation across a whole range of sectors such as health and pharmaceutical, engineering, textile, and automotive, etc. – not just in ICT.

Unfortunately, though, instead of becoming a shining beacon that could inspire such initiatives in other industry sectors, the Fund has so far failed to deliver on its promise. Even though hundreds of millions have been invested over the years in a number research projects, the performance of these projects, particularly in terms of their commercial impact, leaves much to be desired. What has led to this lackluster performance?

For those who have been close to the Fund and have interacted with it, it is quite common knowledge that the Fund wasn’t really designed to deliver what it sought to do. More importantly, it wasn’t even clear to those who have closely watched the Fund what it really sought to do. And whether whatever it wanted to do was possible in the first place. The Fund’s last CEO made it amply clear that it took him a long time to establish processes and procedures to carry out peer review of the proposals that were being submitted to the Fund. Even then, the industry grapevine is full of stories that it took a long time to get a proposal through the Fund’s system of evaluation that was decidedly far from perfect in the first place. It is also known that the Fund, right from its birth, was hardwired and burdened by cumbersome bureaucracy that made sure that anything innovative will probably not go through.

Ingredients for Success

To my mind, the ICT R&D Fund needed (and will still needs) four critical ingredients to become successful. If any one of these ingredients is missing, it will fail to deliver on its objectives. These ingredients are, in order: i) a clearly defined set of objectives, and a structure that is geared towards achieving these objectives; ii) a realistic strategy for achieving its objectives (including an in-depth technical understanding of each problem-set that it seeks to target and technical challenges inherent within those) and a program of activities aimed at tackling these challenges; iii) a capable leader at the helm who has experience of delivering similar programs; iv) systems and processes in place (and flexibility, where needed) to allow the fund to achieve its objectives instead of getting bogged down in never ending bureaucracy.

Going through this list, it becomes quite evident why and how these ingredients are so critically interlinked, in that the failure to provide one will render the others in-effective. For example, if the Fund was not designed right, it would hardly matter how capable a leader it has at its helm. Worse still, an ill-deigned Fund that doesn’t know what it wants to achieve is not likely to attract a capable person in the first place. Similarly, even the most capable of the leaders is likely to fail without appropriate processes and systems (and flexibility) to support him or her. The singular factor responsible for the Fund’s lackluster performance is the lack of understanding of this cause-and-effect logic.

I believe that the National ICT R&D Fund should focus on near-market opportunities that find commercial applications in short-to-medium term (1-3 years). This would require funding ideas that target a clear market opportunity and keeping the recipients of the Fund’s support responsible for delivering a commercialized product. This would ensure that the Fund will not just duplicate the work of the HEC but would add additional value within the innovation continuum. It would also force the universities and the industry to work together in a manner that would lead to commercialization of research.

Redesigning the Fund

The upcoming change in the leadership at the National ICT R&D Fund provides an excellent opportunity to assess the performance of the Fund so far, and, more importantly, to develop a coherent set of objectives, strategies, roadmaps, and systems to empower it to deliver on national objectives in the future. This will require, perhaps, going back to the drawing board. This, I believe, is necessary and the appointment of new leadership without addressing the critical weaknesses in the objectives, strategy, and structure of the Fund would mean another 3 years of wasted energies.

Redesigning the Fund to deliver on its promise will require 4 distinct elements described below:

• Step 1: The most critical ingredient for designing a successful Fund is a policy framework and strategic direction that is carefully thought-through and developed and that aligns it with the national goals and objectives agreed upon by relevant parties.

The importance of identifying realistic and achievable national goals and laying out an initial policy framework that will allow the National ICT R&D Fund to resolutely move towards those goals cannot be over-emphasized. Before expecting the Fund to achieve some objectives, we need to clearly define what those objectives are. These national level objectives must be clear, concise, measurable, and realistic. One cannot simply expect the Chief Executive of the Fund to dream of what would be in the best interest of the country as he goes along investing money and creating new programs. It is not enough for the Fund to say that it seeks to “promote” an innovation-centric ICT research and development eco-system in Pakistan. The Fund must define in much greater detail what it seeks to do and how what it contributes to that goal. The definition of the strategic direction and policy framework will ultimately define what programs and interventions are needed.

• Step 2: Once the overall objectives of the Fund have been identified, it must carry out an extensive strategic planning and technology road-mapping exercise to chart the course for getting there.

A technology road-mapping exercise, if properly carried out, will involve extensive consultations with experts within an industry both inside and outside the country to first identify an (almost) exhaustive list of technical challenges and bottlenecks in achieving the objectives and then laying out alternative approaches that may be followed to address these challenges. For example, if one of the objectives is to develop a smart network management system, the first task is to define what the current level of performance is, what would be the desired level of performance from this system, what are all of the technical bottlenecks in achieving that performance, and what alternate approaches can be used to address those challenges. Once a list of all possible alternative approaches is developed, one is in a better position to match ones resources and capabilities with how the objective might be achieved. This exercise must be carried out in consultation with stakeholders (IT and Telecom Companies and Universities etc.) within the country so as to identify approaches that are realistic and achievable and in line with current capabilities. The existence of such a roadmap will help the leadership of National ICT R&D Fund to develop and fine-tune precise programs or priorities aimed at solving a pre-defined set of technical challenges that may lead to new products and services in the market.

• Step 3: The third key element of a well-designed Fund is the program design that will comprise the “instruments” of policy the Fund will have to achieve its objectives.

Once we know what we want to achieve, and how to get there, the Fund needs a toolkit of policy instruments – i.e. different kinds of funding programs -  that will enable it to achieve its objectives. This programmatic design must be informed by the Fund’s objective and the strategic roadmap. For example, would the Fund require some basic research? Would it need to fund industrial collaborations? Do we need a proof of concept program that will need to be supplemented by development funding later on? Do we need to support entrepreneurship – and how? Could an “Innovation Prize” be used to solve the problem? These are questions that would ultimately define the programs and instruments in the fund’s policy toolkit. In designing new instruments and restructuring older ones, one must also learn from the past by analyzing the current portfolio of the Fund and understand how the Fund’s current toolkit aids or hinders innovation, where the big gaps are, and how might it be strengthened to remove the bottlenecks towards commercialization and commercial impact.

• Step 4: The final element of an effective Fund is an evidence-based performance assessment mechanism that helps the Fund’s management to assess and report on progress and correct course, if necessary.

The final ingredient of a well-designed and effective National ICT R&D Fund must be an evidence-based policy and performance assessment mechanism that continuously assesses, informs, and improves the Fund’s performance. An effective organization must be a learning organization. This is much more true for an R&D Funding Program than for any other type of organization primarily because it must deal with processes (i.e. research, development, and innovation) that are inherently unpredictable and ever-changing. The Fund must also be flexible enough to deal with this unpredictability and adaptive enough to learn and maneuver in the changing techno-economic landscape.  The performance assessment system I am talking about is quite distinct from financial reporting that is already in place at the Fund but instead focuses on developing mechanisms to assess and improve the effectiveness of how the Fund is doing in its ability to achieve its final objectives – not just whether it is spending the money it was supposed to spend. Unfortunately, the latter is often the practice with much of program funding in the government but this may represent a critical gap in designing and managing an innovation funding program.

Taking into account the above 4-step approach, I believe, will significantly improve the focus and performance of the National ICT R&D Fund and empower it to realize its full potential.

I believe, for one, that the basic concept of setting aside a share of revenues to invest in research and innovation is noble, sound and creative way of providing much-needed resources for investing in our long term economic future without burdening the fragile short term public finances of the country. It is my sincere hope that the National ICT R&D Fund could be re-drawn to enable it to deliver on its promise of promoting meaningful goal-driven innovation within the ICT sector and hence become a shining beacon for other sectors to emulate.

Dr. Athar Osama is a science policy consultant and advisor and is the lead author of a paper published in the prestigious journal Nature titled “Pakistan’s Reform Experiment” that analyzed the effectiveness of Pakistan’s investment in the Higher Education. Dr. Osama has been, for over 15 years now, a student and a practitioner of the science and art of science and innovation policy and has been an advisor and consultant to The Royal Society (UK), OIC, PSEB, PASHA, and SciDev.Net. He worked at one of the world’s leading public policy think tank where he was a part of a team that helped restructure the R&D and Engineering infrastructure of a major US public agency, analysed the performance of US Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Programme, and helped form a public sector venture capital fund. Athar is the founder of Muslim-Science.Com. He maybe contacted at athar.osama@gmail.com.

Editor’s Note: In 2009, we conducted an in-depth interview with Dr. Qasim Sheikh, the-then CEO of the National ICT R&D Fund. The interview is available here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

Whenever there is an advertisement for jobs in the scientific discipline in public sector research and development organizations with Special Pay Scales (SPS) for sixteen-year degree holders, one of the requirements is that the educational career of the potential candidate must be 1st Division throughout, with the exception of one second division in any degree excluding the final degree. These job opportunities are open for everyone who has completed at least sixteen years of education, whether they are Bachelors or Masters. Candidates who have completed a sixteen years Bachelors degree have a tangible advantage over candidates who have a sixteen years Masters degree, because for a sixteen year Bachelors graduate there are only three degrees, i.e., SSC (Secondary School Certificate), HSC (Higher Secondary Certificate) and B.Sc. (four-year Bachelors), to satisfy the requirement listed above. For a sixteen-year M.Sc. graduate there are four degrees, i.e., SSC, HSC, B.Sc. (two-years Bachelors) and M.Sc. to satisfy the grading requirements for SPS jobs. The sixteen years M.Sc. graduate has to produce desired results in four degrees, while a sixteen year bachelor has to produce desired result out of only three degrees.

While applying for jobs in the international market, many students in my situation don’t know what to write on their resume — Bachelors or Masters. If I write Masters, the prospective employers expect me to have completed 18 year of education. And, if I write Bachelors, I find myself having a Masters degree in my hand and people wonder why I did not mention the word Master on my resume.

Interestingly, HEC also had this requirement for a certain number of 1st Divisions that I mentioned before, for granting scholarships. One of my friends told me that Dr. Atta Ur Rehman, former HEC Chairman, replies to students’ emails so I wrote to him about this problem. He acknowledged my arguments and appointed Dr. Inayat to resolve this issue. As a result, this requirement was discarded from their scholarship criteria and it was replaced with “1st division in terminating degree with no 3rd division in the entire education career.”

Today, we are using the abbreviations B.S. and B.Sc. to denote the 16-years bachelors and the 14-years bachelor, respectively. Same is true with MS (which holds for 18 years Masters) and M.Sc. (which holds for 16 years Master). This, I would say, is a poor attempt to hide the prevailing state of senselessness. All over the world B.S. and B.Sc. stand for the same degree, as is the case with M.S. and M.Sc.

If we look at the world around us, we can easily see that bachelor-level education is equivalent for all subjects and disciplines. We need to implement the same, i.e., four year bachelors for every subject, in Pakistan. It would make our educational and employment system more harmonized, understandable and practicable. It will also create sensible understanding about our educational system inside and outside the country. We can introduce something like HNC (Higher National Certificate) for people who want to terminate their education at 14 years of education.

Majid-ur-Rehman holds an M.Sc. and B.Sc. both in Physics from Government College of Science, Wahdat Road, Lahore. Majid currently works in a Dubai-based organization as Country Manager – Pakistan.

The Atlas is a study (Atlas Brochure) that will explore the changing landscape of science and innovation across a diverse selection of countries with large Muslim populations in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, including in-depth case studies of fifteen geographically and economically diverse countries. It aims to draw important cross-country conclusions to help national policy-makers, international stakeholders, and development planners to chart the way forward. Working closely with partners in each of these countries, the project will chart the delicate interplay between science, innovation, culture and politics, and explore new opportunities for partnership and exchange with the wider world.

The project is a true partnership between OIC family institutions and member countries and partners in Europe, Canada and the US. With oversight by the Secretary General of the OIC, Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, and jointly managed by the Royal Society and SESRIC in Turkey, this project draws upon a wide range of OIC institutions, local country partners, independent experts and other partners such as the COMSTECH, ISESCO, IDB, the British Council, IDRC (Canada), and Qatar Foundation. In that respect, the AIWSI project is an important example of how the West and the Muslim World can work together to achieve their common objectives of development.

Country Case Study: Pakistan

The Pakistan Case study of the Atlas Project has been launched in Nov 2009 and will conclude by December 2010. The Pakistan Case Study will look at the innovation landscape in Pakistan paying due emphasis to geographical as well as sectoral dimensions of innovation as well as other factors such as collaboration, people and diasporic interactions, and socio-cultural and economic factors affecting innovation. These Atlas studies build upon earlier work (here) carried out on other countries but also extend them as per the specific terms and conditions of the AIWSI project (e.g. Brazil, India and China).

Each country case study is led by a Country Leader Researcher from the Project’s International Research Team and supported by other members of the project office at Royal Society and SESRIC. This Lead Researcher works with a National Focal Point (a policy-making entity like a Ministry or relevant entity within the host country that takes on the role of the key “door opener” and supporter) and a National Research Partner (a non-for-profit university, think tank, or civil society organization with extensive links with relevant organizations and existing or potential research capacity to support the research work within country). One of the core elements of the Atlas programme is the desire to build local capacity to carry out research work of this nature and to help support the continuation of the research agenda through local ownership and capacity building.

Timeframe:

The Lead Country Researcher along with members of Royal Society Team carried out a scoping trip in November 2009. The study kicked off in December 2009. HEC was appointed as the National Focal Point in February 2010 followed with the nomination of LUMS as National Research Partner in May 2010. The final report will be released in December 2010 at the COMSTECH Science Ministers Meeting in Islamabad.

Call for Nominations for Research and Commercialisation Success Stories for Atlas of Islamic World Science & Innovation (Pakistan Country Study)

The Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) in Collaboration with The Royal Society (United Kingdom) is currently carrying out an exercise to document the state and promise of science and innovation across the Islamic World. This is a multinational effort funded by a number of international donors that seeks to bring visibility to Science in the Muslim World, identify pockets of excellence and good scientific practice, and hence promote greater scientific collaboration between OIC countries and between OIC Countries and the West. The Pakistan Atlas Study will be released in December 2010 at the COMSTECH’s Science Ministers Conference in Islamabad. 

In addtion, the Atlas Project seeks to create national dialogues across the Islamic world on the importance of science and innovation in Muslim Societiesand thus lead to policy change and create better opportunities and environment for for research and research commercialisation. The project’s objectives and timelines are described below.

The Atlas Project Team comprising researchers from The Royal Society (UK) and the National Research Parter (Lahaore University of Management Sciences are seeking inputs on research and commercialisation success stories that the Principal Investigators believe are worthy of projection at the OIC and international level. In particular, we’re interested in examples of significant scientific or commercialisation accomplishments done for the first time in the Muslim Countries or the World and that have received major international acclaim or achieved commercial success.

Scientists and Technologists are invited to send in their nominations by August 31st, 2010 at the latest. Each nomination must include the following:

a) Name of the Principal Investigator and other researchers
b) Contact of the Principal Investigator (including mobile number and email)
c) Name and Contact of Foreign Collaborator (if any)
d) Research or Patent Abstract (or Brief Description of Commercialisation Activity)
e) Scientific Significance or Commercial Value of the Innovation (especially what has already been achieved)
d) Any external (third-party) validation of the work and conact information for the validator
f) Links to Published Work (or Patent) and Impact factor of the Journals where the work has been published
g) A Short Statement Outlining why you believe this work is worthy of show-casing Pakistan at an International level.

One individual may make more than one nominations although it is unlikely that both will be included. It is better to focus on your most significant work with greatest impact (or likely impact). The Atlas Team will evaluate the significance of each entry and will contact those they feel could be included in the Atlas Report.

These entries may be sent to: athar.osama@gmail.com and zahoor@lums.edu.pk

Dr. Athar Osama

Visiting Fellow, Pardee Centre, Boston University,
Country Lead Researcher – Pakistan
Atlas of Islamic World Science and Innovation (AIWSI)

Dr. Zahoor Hassan

Professor, SDSB, Lahore University of Management Sciences
Co-Principal Investigator – Pakistan
Atlas of Islamic World Science and Innovation (AIWSI)

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.

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.

When I returned from the States Pakistan was going through its worst existential crises due to the split electoral mandate of the elections that were held soon after East Pakistan was devastated by a cyclone in the of Fall 1970. I had raised and sent some relief funds for the Cyclone victims just before my departure from the Sates and was feeling very uneasy about the army action against the Bengali ‘separatists’ that looked imminent. Even a very senior physicist colleague I greatly respected, and still respect, argued with me that if East Pakistanis want independence then they had to fight it out. If I recall correctly Faheem was the only academics I knew who was against such action.

Since many other colleagues, who are more familiar with his teaching and research will be talking about that aspect of his life I will mainly confine myself with his concerns for the welfare of the common man.

I was not particularly convinced of any positive outcome of the roti-kapra-makan slogan; however the events leading to the elections of 1970 had raised many hopes and galvanized many to struggle for ushering in a people-centric system of government in the country. It was through Faheem that I met some of these people in Rawalpindi-Islamabad and beyond, who were serious in translating this program into a reality. It didn’t take long for Faheem in persuading me working with him. Faheem hosted most of the meetings and provided ideas and offered his own time and money. His own simple living and his spirit of caring for and sharing with others whatever he had served as an example for others to emulate. His American wife, Jan, fully supported all his efforts, who besides being an excellent host actively participated in the discussions and related activities.

Asghar has already referred to Faheem’s keen interest in teaching beyond the class room. He, together with colleagues from QAU and PINSTECH, arranged weekly seminars on contemporary physics topics to motivate students and teachers of colleges round Islamabad in studying physics and often himself volunteered to give talks. It was through one of his talks in this series that I first learned about Thomas Kuhn’s famous work on ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’. More recently he very kindly agreed to come all the way to GIKI, Topi to give lectures on basic physics and interact with students of National Physics Talent Contest, who were selected to represent Pakistan in International Physics Olympiad. He was always very supportive of this program whenever I used discuss it with him during my visits to Trieste, Italy.

As already mentioned by many friends, Faheem was always a man of principles and willing to fight for them even with his friends. About two years ago I was on a search committee with him, Asghar Qadir and some other professionals. After a lot of deliberations and heated arguments, mostly led by Faheem, the Committee agreed on a candidate. The Board, for some reason, wanted me also to be a candidate. On hearing this Faheem wrote me a very blunt letter asking me not to agree. He argued that as member of the search committee for that post it was unethical for me to be considered for it.

He told me about his cancer soon after he was diagnosed during one of my visits to Trieste. He was very calm and least worried about it. In fact soon after that he drove me to visit a common friend of Pakistani origin living an hour drive from Trieste, who was also diagnosed for cancer. Both of them were so jolly and unconcerned about their ailment that one could hardly imagine they were suffering from this dreadful disease. His early treatment looked very successful and we almost forgot about his illness. Last year when he didn’t return from his visit to Trieste, where he had gone for routine check-up, like his other friends I also began to feel concerned. He, as usual, kept forwarding e-mails sharing his concern about the massacre in Gaza and the human rights violations in Pakistan and elsewhere without any mention of his own condition. The last e-mail exchange I had with him, as mentioned in Rinku’s article, was hardly a few weeks before he breathed his last. I tried to talk to him after Pervez’s SMS about his critical condition but alas it was too late. He was already heavily sedated and I could only talk to his son, Nadeem, just a few hours before he passed away. In him we have lost not only a personal friend but also a friend of the wretched of the Earth, an exemplary teacher, a great physicist and a great organizer, who always put other’s interest before his own.

Revolutionary, humanist, and scientist, Faheem Hussain embodied the political and social ferment of the late 1960′s. With a Ph.D that he received in 1966 from Imperial College London, he had been well-placed for a solid career anywhere in the world. In a profession where names matter, he had worked under the famous P.T. Mathews in the group headed by the even better known Abdus Salam. After his degree, Faheem spent two years at the University of Chicago. This gave him a chance to work with some of the world’s best physicists, but also brought him into contact with the American anti-Vietnam war movement and a powerful wave of revolutionary Marxist thinking. Even decades later, Faheem would describe himself as an “unreconstructed Marxist”. Participating in the mass anti-war demonstrations at UC had stirred his moral soul; he felt the urge to do more than just physics. Now married to Jane Steinfels, a like-minded soul who he met in Chicago, Faheem decided to return to Pakistan.

Faheem and Jane made an amazing couple. Fully immersed in the outstanding causes of the times, they seemed to have a limitless amount of revolutionary energy. Long before I knew them, they had been protesting against the Pakistan Army’s actions in East Pakistan. As Faheem would recount, this was a lonely fight. Many Marxists in those times, inspired by Mao’s China, chose to understand the issue in geopolitical terms rather than as a popular struggle for independence. Some leftists ended up supporting the army’s mass murder of Bengalis.

With Bangladesh now a reality, things moved on. Bhutto’s rhetoric of socialism and justice for the poor had inspired nascent trade union movements to sprout across Pakistan’s cities. Many, however, quickly turned into organizations for labour control rather than emancipation.

There were genuinely independent ones too, such as the Peoples Labour Federation (PLF), an independent Rawalpindi based trade union that saw through Bhutto’s shallow rhetoric. In the early 1970′s, Faheem and Jane were highly influential in this organization, sometimes providing security and cover to its hunted leadership. Iqbal Bali, who passed away in the middle of this year, would vividly recount those days.

Very soon, I joined the small group of leftwing activists that looked up to this couple for instruction and guidance. We formed study groups operating under the PLF, both for self-education and for spreading the message through small study groups of industrial workers. Some, including myself, branched out further, working in distant villages. Gathering material support for the Baloch nationalists, who were fighting an army rejuvenated by Bhutto, was yet another goal for the group. The dream was to bring about a socialist revolution in Pakistan.

All this crashed to an end with Bhutto’s death by hanging in 1979 and the subsequent consolidation of General Zia-ul-Haq’s coup. Pakistan’s Dark Age had just begun. Although Bhutto’s regime had turned repressive and violent in its last desperate days, it was gentle in comparison with what was to follow. With dissent savagely muzzled, the only option was to operate underground. On 3 November 1981, three of our QAU colleagues and friends were caught, imprisoned, and savaged by the military regime. Jamil Omar, a lecturer in computer science and the “ring leader” – was tortured. Two others – Tariq Ahsan and Mohammed Salim – were also imprisoned and their careers destroyed. Their crime was involvement in the secret publication of “Jamhoori Pakistan”, a 4-page newsletter that demanded return to democracy and the end of army rule. A triumphant Zia-ul-Haq went on Pakistan Television, congratulated the men who had succeeded in arresting the teachers, and pledged to “eliminate the cancer of politics” from Quaid-e-Azam University.

Although Faheem was not directly involved in “Jamhoori Pakistan”, we knew he was being closely watched by the intelligence and could have chosen to hide. Instead, with characteristic fearlessness, he did all that was possible to help locate the abducted teachers, and then to secure their release. Tariq Ahsan wrote to me from Canada that “His solidarity during those long years was an invaluable source of support for our families and friends.”

But the struggle took its toll. By the mid 1980′s, Faheem was in the doldrums. Situated in an academically barren environment, he was able to publish little research of worth. Politically, there was no chance of doing anything significant in the climate of repression. Things had gone downhill in personal terms as well – his marriage with Jane was coming apart. To the great sorrow of their friends, the couple parted ways and Jane returned to America. Encouraged by Faheem, she had written school books on Pakistani history that are still sold and used today. In 1989, Faheem left QAU formally but his involvement in academic and political matters had already dropped off in the year or two before that.

From this low point in his life, Faheem struggled upwards. Initially in Germany, and then elsewhere later, he now concentrated solely upon his profession and was able to learn an impressive amount of new physics.

Professor Abdus Salam, who by now had received a Nobel Prize for his work, invited Faheem to become a permanent member of the theoretical physics group at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy. Faheem remained there until his retirement in 2004. Getting this position was no mean achievement: theoretical physics is a fiercely competitive and notoriously difficult subject. Faheem was the first Pakistani to publish a research paper in one of its most challenging areas – superstring theory.

With a cheerful and positive disposition, and an abiding concern for the welfare of others, Faheem quickly became popular at the ICTP. His laughter would resonate in the institute’s corridors. With time, he took on administrative responsibilities as well and was instrumental in setting up a “Diploma Programme” that admits students from third world countries for advanced studies in various areas. Now married to Sara, a beautiful and even-tempered Italian woman, he was equally comfortable with Italians and Pakistanis or, for that matter, Indians. To Faheem, a cultural amphibian, differences between nations carried no meaning.

And then came retirement time. What to do? I wrote to Faheem: come back!

He agreed. Finding money was not a problem – Pakistan’s higher education was experiencing a budgetary boom. But his old university, plagued by base rivalries and a contemptuous disdain for learning, refused. Specious arguments were given to prevent one of its own founding members, now one of Pakistan’s most distinguished and active physicists, from being taken on the faculty. Initially at the National Centre for Physics in Islamabad, Faheem was eventually offered a position at the newly established science faculty of LUMS in Lahore.

Faheem’s unpretentious mannerisms and gentleness of spirit ensured that LUMS too was enamored of him. Asad Naqvi, one of Pakistan’s leading physicists and a faculty member at LUMS, wrote to me upon hearing of Faheem’s death: “I am lost after hearing this. I only knew him for about 5 years, and in that short time, I had grown really fond of him. We are all poorer today, having lost such a lovely person who touched us so deeply.”

Surely, there shall be many other such tributes from Faheem’s many friends. But, to be true to him as well as my own self, I must admit that in later years we did disagree on some important things – “unreconstructed Marxism” to me is an anachronism, a relic of the 1960′s and still earlier, meaningless in a world that has become far more complex than Marx could have possibly imagined. Nor can I reflexively support today’s so-called “anti-imperialism” of the left that ends up supporting the forces of regressive fundamentalism. But let these issues stand wherever they do.

Why is it necessary for friends to agree upon everything?

From atoms to atoms – death is inevitable, the final victory of entropy over order. Meaningless? No! To have lived a full life, to have experienced its richness, to have struggled not just for one-self but for others as well, and to have earned the respect and love of those around you. That is a life worth living for. Faheem, my friend, you are gone. May you now rest in peace, with a job well done.

STEP: According to recent estimates, less than half of Pakistan’s population is literate, less than half have access to basic sanitation, and the economy is strangled by debt. In context of this, what is the social relevance and value of the modern university, with its emphasis on research and higher learning, in Pakistan today?

PH: Pakistan’s social indicators are indeed abysmal. But no country can wait for everything and everybody to get up to speed before making universities. Nor should it, because that would essentially mean waiting forever. But we should remember that there is a difference in the purposes that universities serve in countries like Pakistan, and in advanced countries like the US. The latter have knowledge-driven economies, and universities function as the engines of progress. They are the fountainheads of modern science, and of new technologies that have changed the world more in the past fifty years than the previous ten thousand years.

In Pakistan, our universities do not produce much new technology or ideas.  Nevertheless their graduates are necessary to keep the country going. Else the country would not have engineers, technicians, doctors, and administrators needed to run institutions, factories, businesses, and government.

There is another reason for a country to have universities – and this is quite independent of whether they produce state-of-the art research or not.  Universities are needed to create a modern citizenry capable of responsible and reasoned decision making. Their graduates should be able to think independently and scientifically, have an understanding of history and culture, create discourses on social and political issues, and be capable of coherent expression in speech and writing.

The fact that our universities do not measure well on this score is deeply regrettable. Yet, this suggests that we should strive to improve them, not eliminate them. At the same time, although buildings can rather easily constructed, Pakistan’s very limited intellectual resources put strong constraints on the number of actual higher education institutions that it can have.

STEP: Beyond their role as educational institutions, what is the value of emphasizing research, specifically theoretical and technical research, at universities in Pakistan?

PH: Research on the theoretical aspects of a subject is important for two reasons. First, genuine research, even if it is not cutting edge, makes the individual teacher much more aware of the state of the field and hence a better, more exciting teacher. Book knowledge becomes stale fast, particularly these days. Second, knowledge is advanced only through research, and Pakistan should play a role in this some day. India already is doing so, and Iran has begun to as well. Theoretical research is intellectually harder and more demanding than experimental research, and it consumes far fewer resources. Thus it should be strongly encouraged.

But since “research” is a widely abused term in Pakistan, some careful consideration of its meaning is necessary before attempting to evaluate its current importance in our universities. Research in any professional field — mathematics or physics, molecular biology or engineering, economics or archaeology — does not have a unique, precise definition. But a tentative, exploratory definition might be that research is the discovery of new and interesting phenomena, creation of concepts that have explanatory or predictive power, making of new and useful inventions and processes, etc. In the world of science, the researcher must certainly do something original, not merely repeat what is already known. Just doing something for the first time is not good enough to qualify as research. So, for example, one does not do meaningful research by gathering all kinds of butterflies and listing the number caught of each kind in a particular place at a particular time, etc. Nor does it come from making standard measurements, substituting one material after the other just because “it’s not been done before”.

We must recognize that very few Pakistani universities and their faculty currently have the capacity for real research. Nevertheless, they can still function quite well as knowledge transmitters. For example, some of Pakistan’s elite private universities have good teaching standards although they have few journal publications at this stage of their development. My feeling is that if a university teacher does not have the physical, material, or intellectual resources to do genuine research, it is far better that that person be made to improve his or her pedagogical practices as well as subject understanding. This is far better than churning out junk papers, which no one reads.

STEP: You have been a leading critic of some of the policies the HEC has initiated to address the state of research in Pakistan. Let’s say you are given Rs 21 billion (HEC’s 2009 budget) and stewardship of an organization with a mandate to reform universities in Pakistan. What would be the three most pressing items on your agenda and how would you go about instituting them?

PH: I would shift priorities drastically and emphasize improving the physical infrastructure of the 1000+ colleges rather than pampering a few public universities. Of the available money and effort, I would put 90% towards improving teaching quality at our public universities and colleges. Only promising research would be supported. Today’s atrocious teaching quality comes largely from having university and college teachers with very poor knowledge of their subject. Therefore I would call for the following:

1. Require that every applicant for lecturer or assistant professor, either at a public university or college, pass a relevant internationally administered examination (such as the GRE subject test if one is available in that field, else the GRE General Exam). The test would ensure that that person has enough basic knowledge to properly teach the subject. The applicant would also be required to give an introductory lecture, open to all who wish to attend, on a subject belonging to the applicant’s claimed field of expertise. The entire process of teacher selection needs to be made transparent and above board.
2. Create large-scale teacher-training academies in every provincial capital. Established with international help, these academies should bring in the best teachers as trainers from across the country and from anywhere in the world. A few master trainers might be willing to come from western countries in spite of the security situation, but hopefully attractive salaries might be able to lure some from India or from outside the Western world. These academies must be on the scale of a mega-project, say on the order of a billion dollars over 5 years. As high-quality institutions, they should have a clear philosophy aimed at equipping teachers to teach through concepts rather than rote learning, use modern textbooks, and emphasize basic principles of pedagogy, grading, and fairness. To be effective, they must be degree-awarding institutions.
3. Build on various current HEC initiatives such as foreign faculty hiring and scholarship schemes for university teachers. There are simply not enough qualified persons within Pakistan to adequately staff university departments. The fact that these schemes have been mismanaged by the HEC should not prejudice one against their potential usefulness if proper procedures and rules are adhered. Those selected for overseas scholarships should be required to clear an international subject test.

STEP: You note that “university and college teachers [have] very poor knowledge of their subject.” Yet, the scope of the teacher-training academies would presumably be pedagogical technique and not the outright re-education of teachers in their subject material. Is a multi-billion rupee investment in pedagogical training worth it, when subject proficiency seems like the fundamental problem?

PH: Thank you for forcing me to clarify. I very much have subject proficiency in mind. In fact, in the proposed new teacher training institutions I would give 90% importance to re-teaching subject basics and only 10% to pedagogy. So, in fact, teaching teachers “teaching-methods” is a very distant second priority. Let me say that those studying in these hypothetical NFAs (National Faculty Academies) would be relearning materials that they are actually supposed to know from their time in college or university. But there would be a crucial difference: this time they will be graded not by how much they have memorized but how well they are able to use what they have learned in order to solve problems. In science, knowledge is useful only if it is internalized rather than memorized. It must become part of your mental tool box.

There would be another important side benefit to having competent teachers. I am convinced that if a teacher knows his or her subject and is able to comfortably solve all or most of the problems at the end of a chapter, it would lead to important attitudinal changes. Some of the authoritarianism of teachers would surely go away. It is a fact that teachers often discourage students from asking questions because they know that their lack of understanding would be exposed. This is lethal for an academic environment.

STEP: Your proposal has a parallel to the erstwhile universities mega-project in that, rather than reforming and investing in existing universities, it recommends creating entirely new institutions. Why the inclination to create new academies instead of focusing resources and effort into reforming existing programs?

PH: Suppose you had inherited an airline company but no pilots. Would you like novices to take your planes up in the hope that they will learn flying that way? Of course not! Similarly we have entire universities, but with almost no people who are fit to teach in them. But they still teach, and nobody stops them. So although we don’t have crashed planes, we have armies of university students who graduated but didn’t survive their mis-education. Therefore, they could never become good scientists, engineers, economists, or whatever. In the hard sciences, I’d estimate that a miserable 20-30 percent of university teachers are actually qualified to teach — and I’m being generous.

To fix this situation, I just don’t know of any way other than training teachers in dedicated, specially created, teaching institutions where, at the end, they would be required to show proof through proper examinations that they’ve learned their subject well enough. It’s like a pilot certification requirement. If you don’t pass, you are not allowed to fly — or teach.

To respond specifically as to why we need new institutions: it’s because we just don’t have any teacher training institutions with anything close to the required intellectual capacity. It’s not about reforming something that presently exists but which is not good enough; nothing presently exists where college and university teachers can be adequately taught subject basics.

I might add one caveat: creating any good educational institution in Pakistan means that we will have to get at least some key people from other countries. Unless Pakistan stabilizes and deals with terrorism effectively, no persuasion will ever succeed in bringing them here. Or, perhaps, even expatriate Pakistanis. So this is a super-priority.

STEP: Why did you choose to return to Pakistan after your bachelors and masters degrees from MIT?

PH: Like some others of my generation, in the early 1970′s I was witness to the huge political upheaval in the US. American students were staging protests against their own government over its wrong and immoral war in Vietnam. Hitherto I had regarded politics to be a mere game and had barely any interest in these matters. As a naïve middle-class apolitical Pakistani youth, it seemed totally unbelievable to me that MIT students would be protesting against their own government and country — and that too when it was at war. There were huge protests, boycotts, and even occasional violence. I remember witnessing the violent protests against the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory on campus, which was involved in MIRVing nuclear missiles. It was so liberating for me to see people follow the dictates of their conscience. Now a part of the anti-war movement, I fully understood the ugliness of imperial power and participated in the teach-ins and sit-ins. The atrocities that the US was committing in Vietnam had made me so very angry that I did not want to live a day longer in America than was necessary to finish my degrees.

Then, closer to home, there was the slaughter in East Pakistan being carried out by the West Pakistani army. At the same time, there was a movement for social change in Pakistan that promised socialism and justice for the masses. It was initiated by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who brought revolutionary politics to Pakistan. What happened to him, and how he reneged on his promises, is another story but those were times of immense hope. I was one of the many overseas students who went back to Pakistan dreaming of changing everything, and of replacing feudalistic and capitalistic exploitation with socialism. So, with a job in hand at Islamabad University (QAU went under this name in the 1970′s) I joined up with others who had also recently returned and we became part of a workers movement in Rawalpindi, known as People’s Labour Federation. With another group of friends who were inspired by the idea of a peasant revolution, I became involved with working as a paramedic and school teacher in a remote Potohar village.

Part 2 is shared here.

Kudos, as well, to the organizers and team-leaders: Dr. Zafar M Khalid and Dr. Muhammad Saeed of NIBGE Faisalabad and Al Hasanat Rasul of STEM Careers Programme (IBO), Dr. Khalid M Khan and Dr. Raza Shah of HEJ Research Institute, Karachi (IChO). Dr. A D Raza Choudary and Dr. Ahmed Mahmood Qureshi of ASSMS, GCU, Lahore (IMO), and Dr Shahid Qamar and Dr Masroor Ikram of PIEAS, Islamabad (IPO). This is an outstanding initiative undertaken by SCP, HEC, and the mentoring institutions: HEJ, NIBGE, ASSMS, and PIEAS.

Further details on the STEM and the Olympiad can be found here.

Robo cup is an international competition whose participants, as the name suggests, are robots. The main focus of the competition is RoboCup Soccer, which consists of teams of robots playing soccer. However, the contest also includes other competitions including RoboCup Rescue and Robot Dancing.

RoboCup^TM is an international research and education initiative. Its goal is to foster artificial intelligence and robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be examined and integrated.

Saviour (shown in the image) participated in the RoboCup Rescue League. It was ranked 17th out of a total of 20 participants in the Rescue competition. The Saviour team should be commended for fielding a high-tech robot in an international competition. According to the Saviour team blog, a new group of GIKI students has already started preparation for participation in RoboCup 2010, with the current Saviour team in advisory position. I think Pakistani engineering universities should consistently field teams in international engineering competitions. This is an excellent way to expose Pakistani students to the state of the art in engineering technology. Note that the exposure is not limited to the students participating in the competition, as their peers and juniors also learn a lot from them, and get a chance to improve on the projects for the next version of the competitions.