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.

This is not the first time that Pakistan has been named in these ratings recently. In fact, Pakistan’s record has been very consistent since March 2008, the earliest ratings that are available on the website. Here’s a listing of Pakistan’s mention in the ‘rising star’ ratings:

• March 2008: Engineering, Mathematics
• May 2008: Materials Science
• July 2008: Engineering
• September 2008: Computer Science, Engineering, Materials Science, Mathematics, Plant and Animal Sciences (5 areas!)
• November 2008: Engineering
• January 2009: Computer Science
• March 2009: Computer Science
• May 2009: Materials Science, Plants and Animal Sciences
• July 2009: None

Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, the country’s top university in terms of the number of publications per year, has also been recognized as a ‘rising star’ institution, in Jan 2009 and July 2008 issues, both times in the area of ‘Engineering’.

The ratings are based on the largest percentage increase and not the absolute numbers, and therefore, cannot be used to quantify research productivity in absolute terms. However, they definitely demonstrate the trend of a substantial increase in international publications from Pakistan compared to previous years. It is very healthy that a number of different areas are covered in these past two years, showing an across the board enhancement of research productivity.

While there has been a lot of debate on the effectiveness of HEC’s reforms in higher education, at least one thing is clear: the increased emphasis on research, largely due to HEC’s programs, has started to bear fruit. These are hard numbers here, based on data by the company that maintains the largest scientific citation index in the world, and cannot be easily refuted by the nay-sayers.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Dr Usman Qazi for alerting me to these ratings.

STEP: Do you think that the HEC has taken too much on its plate? It is directly involved in curriculum setting, hiring and firing professors, setting up distance education classrooms, and even assessing universities. Should the HEC delegate some of these tasks?

SN: We definitely should delegate some of these tasks and we are now actively involved in trying to distance ourselves from institutions of programs. Earlier, we got involved with so many of these things because nobody was doing them nor did we have any mechanism for them, for example, foreign faculty hiring. Actually, Faculty hiring should be done by universities as per best practices, where the universities themselves identify the qualified personnel, negotiate their salaries, and provide them incentives to join the faculty. Universities are fully capable of doing that but they were not doing it. Which is why we had to get involved in the execution of a lot of programs. The scholarship program is another example that comes to mind. But we are now shifting our focus. For example, we are shifting the scholarship program so that it now needs to be run by the universities as per best practices. So there was a need to build the capacities of the universities to perform best practices and have good governance. There are other small sized agencies that are not doing enough and are not widespread enough. For example, the HEC has not been involved in the domain of colleges at the moment, and we are criticized on various forums that we should be. But it is a capacity issue; the HEC can only do so much. It is an evolving organization as any living organization has to be. We took on the tasks that nobody else had done before. There were things we needed to do ourselves to get things started. We have designed a lot of these things so that they would start moving at an arm’s length over time and ultimately become independent entities away from the HEC. So the answer to your question is that yes, we could delegate but at times we need to build the organization to which we can delegate.

STEP: Do you see the domain of the HEC decreasing in the future because of these delegations?

SN: No, because the problem that we work with is both large in magnitude and wide in spectrum. There is so much more that the world demands and these demands constantly evolve with the progress. Take quality assurance as an example. In the U.K., you have the Quality Assurance Agency, a huge independent entity that solely focuses on this issue. It is capable of carrying out research assessment exercises where it assesses research work and provides rankings. Development of quality assurance processes, ranking processes, and research assessment processes, etc. are performed by huge entities that have been developed around the world. Therefore, the HEC’s work will keep on increasing in the future. However, the HEC has to ensure that its main goal is to build the capacities within the universities so that when they are built then HEC can work as an external quality assurance mechanism or as a funding source.

STEP: You mentioned that the HEC is not involved with the colleges. Does the HEC see them as being beyond its mandate?

SN: Colleges are under the academic jurisdiction of the provincial governments. Therefore, they are legally and administratively beyond the HEC’s mandate. Colleges are directly tied to universities because they are affiliated with them and we do not want to shift this responsibility. But again, we can build the capacity of the university. Each affiliating university, such as Punjab University, has to basically become a mini HEC or become a quality assurance center for all of its colleges. They should take that responsibility. We have to build this capacity and we have started to move in this direction. Our first foray into this domain is trying to build distance education centers in these colleges to cater to private students, that is, those who are privately enrolled and are not looked after academically by these universities. These centers will enable universities to take care of these students in a proper manner. So this is an indirect way we are getting involved with the colleges.

STEP: Currently, there are two parallel streams of education in Pakistan; the madrassah system and the secular system. Do you think there is a way to merge these two streams into a common system?

SN: Absolutely! After all, such a system has previously existed in our history. Madrassahs have been a part of our history since the birth of Islam. I have visited the oldest Madrassah itself in Morocco and that is more than a thousand years old. I do not think there is any issue of the practical education not fitting into modern requirements. However, we should have a mechanism in our country, whereby a person coming through one system of education is not limited or barred from going anywhere else. So, we have to look at the courses that the madrassahs are teaching and that they are not teaching. If they are not teaching Mathematics or English or whatever that the policies of the country mandate to be taught, then the law needs to be applied to everyone. It is important for students to have the opportunity and the flexibility so that if they want to study jurisprudence they can, and if they want to study history then they also can. The basic idea is that the academia is open. We do not have closed universities and we do not have closed educational institutions. Everything that needs to be taught is open. These are the days of open courseware where everything is available through the Internet. The same openness must be applied to all education systems in Pakistan. If there is a madrassah curriculum, it needs to be put on a website, and it needs to be open to academic discourse just like courses at other universities. For instance, one can take an economic course at LUMS and ask questions concerning different issues, such as, why certain things are being done? what are the intended learning outcomes? and what are the pre-requisites? The rules of the game need to be the same; the quality assurance mechanism needs to be across the board. It is not a western concept to have quality assurance or openness. So I certainly believe that you can have a system that has the richness and the openness to have everyone involved and everyone’s point of view taken care of while also adhering to international practices of quality assurance.

STEP: Does the HEC plan to do something to unify these two different streams?

SN: This is not our domain of operation. As a policy domain we would say that this is something a university should consider. But the actual roots are down at the school level where this issue has to be sorted out and that is not in our domain.

STEP: Could you walk us through the making of a new policy at the HEC?

SN: Well, when a policy idea comes up, we typically set up a working group. Then depending upon the nature and the size of the problem we develop drafts and circulate them to the concerned people. They would bring changes to it, approve it or not, and then finally it goes to the commission for approval.

STEP: Do you have any mechanism for gauging ideas from academics?

SN: We are an open organization in the sense that everybody, each one of us, has email, and we are all required to respond to every single email that we get. In that regards, it is a very open system. In addition, university faculties have their own circles and groups, which they work within and ideas sort of come up. Policies are big things that the entire nation needs to be involved in. They can be localized, for example, we are trying to focus on and develop a sexual harassment policy for academia in Pakistan. So we’ll put something together, it will be widely circulated, and then it will brew up into something narrow. But again, it will still be broad enough to be applicable to every higher education institution in Pakistan.

STEP: This method of gauging ideas seems very informal. Do you think there should be a formal mechanism whereby academics could actively debate and discuss issues regarding higher education?

SN: It is not an informal thing in the sense that while the start (when someone comes up with an idea or identifies an issue to address) is informal, once the idea is there and it is decided that a policy should be developed, then it enters into the formal domain. There is a formal committee or task force constituted where we try to have maximum and most diverse participation. Then drafts are prepared, circulated, and put on the website. You first get input from everybody and then you go through the formal process.

STEP: So anybody can contribute to the policy making process at any time?

SN: Yes, there is no question of having it closed. Academia is open; that is the whole concept of academia.

STEP: The HEC has always endeavored to facilitate universities. Why do you think some faculty members have been resistant to its changes?

SN: Well, some of our policies were perhaps drafted in haste; we wanted to do a lot of things in a hurry and perhaps did not have as wide consultations as were required. So there were certain things that we were proposing that were felt as if they were not in the best interest of these people. It was a communication issue. Also, since we were talking about a lot of entrenched interests, we were disturbing the status quo, so an immediate reaction also came about at times. It was a mixture of things; we were partly at fault. Some of the faculty members were not ready for the change. I guess that is the nature of deal. If you want to bring about change then that’s what happens.

STEP: What is your vision for the HEC? What goals have you set for yourself for the next ten years?

SN: The vision and the goal is to build the institution of the HEC in such a manner that myself or any other individual becomes irrelevant. We want to build the processes that allow one person to go and another to come in while still maintaining a very strong and vibrant system. Another goal is to have a much greater and improved communication with the universities, the students, and the community at large. We want the entire system of higher education to view and accept the HEC as a partner in the development process of the higher education sector.

A very big challenge that we foresee is in terms of funding. This heavy reliance of public sector universities on government is not going to allow us to pull out of this narrow regime of availability of higher education that we are currently in. We have estimated the funds it would take us to maintain our current growth rate and that runs into trillions. And that’s not going to come from the government alone. So their [the universities’] capacity to raise funds and operate just like private universities, such as LUMS, needs to be developed and that will happen once the community starts taking interest in them. Once you get expatriate Pakistanis as well as local industrialists to work with these universities, the universities will get out of this mindset that the government is the only entity that can support them. Aligned with the financial systems is, building a safety net through enhanced equity in our higher education system. Even though we do not think so, we have basically somewhat of an elitist system of higher education, primarily centered on the big cities and catering to a certain class. Regardless of whether the tuition fees is a hundred rupees or five hundred rupees, living in Lahore or Karachi along with the cost of books and transport alone require financial means that are not available to most students. And what about the other areas? The secondary cities; even the suburban areas like Shahdara or Kala Shah Kaku. We need to spread the higher education institution across the country without sacrificing the quality and provide a much more equitable system so that those who need support are fully supported and those who do not need support also put in their fair share.

The final challenge is in terms of quality assurance; building the world class systems that are linked and have a direct relationship with their counterpart international organization so that we are recognized and our degrees and our systems are recognized.

Related Post: A Conversation with HEC Executive Director Dr. Sohail Naqvi: Part 1

Interestingly, in his companion report to the Senate bill, Senator John Kerry includes a vision of introducing “american-style” universities in Pakistan.

The companion report states that:

“Whereas scholarship and fellowship programs are an important part of United States assistance and positively impact relations between our people, it is cost-effective to develop local capacity in American-style higher education in order to broaden cultural understanding. There is a long and remarkable history of American schools and universities around the world. Universities that emulate American curricula such as in Beirut, Lebanon and Cairo, Egypt, have been successfully drawing talented students and producing leaders in government, business, science and education.”

It further goes on to laud the achievements of specific alumni of American Universities in the Middle East:

“They have produced leaders such as Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister; Ali Al-Naimi, Saudi Arabian Minister of Petroleum; Dr. Ashraf Ghani, former Afghan Finance Minister and World Bank official; and former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad. It is intended that assistance under this Act be used to explore the opportunity to establish an American University in Pakistan.”

While the sentiment is quite laudable, one wonders whether Senator Kerry, his staff, or the advisers assisting him in crafting this report, are aware of the slew of universities currently in operation in Pakistan that are closely modeled on the modern American university.  The Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology (GIKI), for instance, has a a four year, semester-system with GPA based evaluation. The Lahore Univeristy of Management Sciences (LUMS) has a quarterly-system, modeled,  as well, after the system in some american universities. These universities, the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), and several other public and private universities already have curricula that is, by any reasonable standard, “american-style” — styled on the template of courses taught in universities in the US. The problem isn’t establishing local capacity in american higher education — that’s already here. The fundamental problem is finding academics and staff that can make universities work, american or otherwise.

To me, what is most notable in the list of accomplished alumni of the American Universities is the absence of a single noted scientist or academic. Having visited the American University in Dubai and Sharjah, I got the distinct impression that these were money-making ventures, without much interest in creating a true intellectual environment (e.g., neither had a PhD program). If Senator Kerry’s proposal of establishing an American university in Pakistan does pan out, one also wonders who would be tasked with the project itself.  Would it be the state department or a private enterprise? Or will it proceed via the HEC? After the fiasco with the Universities mega-project, a multi-billion rupee boondoggle, there may be should be some trepidation.

Another alternative is to encourage an existing American university to establish a satellite campus in Pakistan, like New York University in Abu Dhabi, or Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. However, both these initiatives have been heavily subsidized by the local governments of Qatar and UAE. Perhaps the funds from the Kerry-Lugar bill can be used to incentivize leading american universities (perhaps public US universities?) to establish programs in Pakistan. Security concerns aside, these enterprises seem to have come closest to transplanting viable academic institution in countries where academic and intellectual traditions are currently dormant.