Dr. Shaukhat Hammed Khan is the Executive Director of Society for the Promotion of Engineering Sciences and Technology in Pakistan (SOPREST), the parent body of GIK Institute. A nuclear physicist by training, he recently served as the Rector of GIKI and member of the Planning Commission. In Part 2 of our conversation with Dr. Khan we talk about GIKI — its vision and its future, his work on lasers and much more. Part 1 of our conversation is here.
A Conversation with Dr. Shaukat Hameed Khan – Part 2 of 2
December 22, 2010
The recent article by Sohaib Khan has touched a very important subject. Let me start by saying that I do not disagree with the core idea of that piece which, if I am allowed to summarize in a sentence, would be that research in Pakistan needs to be relevant to the local problems, with young researchers mentored towards practical, solutions-oriented research. Read the rest of this entry »
Building an ICT R&D Eco-System in Pakistan: A Conversation with Dr Qasim Sheikh (Part 2-of-2)
October 22, 2009
On Funding Projects from the Industry
STEP: Till now, mostly you were funding projects in the academia. Would you be looking at funding projects that are directly initiated by the industry?
QS: We are supposed to fund projects submitted by the industry. Our proposal can be initiated by even an individual. But, being an entity that funds public money, the longevity of the institution to which we are giving money is very important to us. An individual can take the money (from us), work for a little while, and then disappear. What do we do then? Universities don’t disappear. They can provide longevity and credibility to the project. And, it is not (just) longevity for the length of that project but even after that. Read the rest of this entry »
DISCUSSION: What are the correct metrics to measure higher education reform in Pakistan?
September 17, 2009
Nature’s recent article on higher education in Pakistan has re-ignited the debate on higher education reform, evoking strong responses from both supporters and critics of the HEC. Recently, we interviewed the lead author Dr. Athar Osama, to learn more about his wider conclusions, and his response to some of the criticisms of the methodology used in the Nature article.
To seed this discussion, we present commentary from Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy and Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman. Dr. Hoodbhoy presents his opposing point of view, arguing that the measures presented in the article were inadequate, and further that the conclusions drawn from the metrics were flawed. Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman, founding (and former) chairman of the HEC, who led the higher education reform effort during his tenure, responds by pointing to data that, in his view, shows the depth and breadth of the reform’s success.
We invite our readers to contribute their thoughts on what metrics are appropriate for measuring the success of higher education within the context of Pakistan.
NOTE: Both commentators have significantly shaped the landscape of Pakistani education over the last few decades. We request our discussants to avoid personalizing the discussion and to maintain a civil and constructive tone.
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Read Dr. Hoodbhoy’s complete post here. |
Read Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman’s complete post here. |
Nature’s Coverage of Higher Education Reform in Pakistan: Comments by Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman
September 17, 2009
Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy has reproduced his email but not my subsequent response to it.
There are four aspects of the comments of Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy that need to be considered:
- Firstly, Dr. Hoodbhoy himself admits that there has been a huge increase in international publications at QAU after HEC came into existence when he mentions the number of international publications in the two time periods. Strangely, he picks a six year period, 1998-2003, and then compares it with the subsequent 4.5 years (?) , 2004 to mid 2008, (the correspondence occurred in August 2008, so he could not possibly have had access to the figures for the entire year) I can only assume that he has mentioned 2003 by mistake in the second “5 year” period as there is no reason to include the publications of the year 2003 in both time periods, which he has done. It is clearly unfair to take two time periods of different durations and compare them.
Nature’s Coverage of Higher Education Reform in Pakistan: A Response from Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy
September 17, 2009
This communication is concerned with “Pakistan’s Reform Experiment” (Nature, V461, page 38, 3 September 2009), and the response to my critique by its lead author.
Unfortunately, I find the response as unsatisfying as the original article. Since Nature is unwilling to accord me a chance for a satisfactory reply on its pages, I shall clarify the basis of my criticism in some detail here.
In the said article, strong conclusions have been derived from weak data. The authors have not dared to ask the basic questions whose answers are essential for ascertaining whether there has been actual progress in Pakistan’s higher education system and, if so, by how much. Instead, in giving a thumbs-up, numbers have been quoted that have doubtful significance. Take, for instance, the claim that:
“In mathematics, for example, an average paper by a Pakistani author is cited around 20% more than the worldwide average for the discipline”.
Nature’s Coverage of Higher Education Reform in Pakistan: A Conversation with Athar Osama
September 10, 2009
Dr. Athar Osama is a public policy researcher with specialization in science and innovation policy and a visiting fellow at Pardee Centre for the Study of Long Range Global Future at Boston University. He is the lead author of the article “Pakistan’s Reform Experiment” in this week’s issue of Nature (Sept. 3, 2009), which is raising quite a bit of debate (and controversy) on whether the Higher Education Commission has delivered the aspired results and what can other countries contemplating the reforms learn from this experience. STEP contacted him to seek his views on the article. Read the rest of this entry »
Students’ extracurricular activities on campuses are signs of thriving learning centers. There have been student unions in our colleges and universities since independence. These elected student bodies were first banned during Zia’s regime, restored for a short interval in 1988 when PPP came into power, and then banned again a year later. The debate on whether these bodies should be allowed on campuses has been revived by the current government.
Student political groups, which are, in reality, the student wings of regional or mainstream political parties, plead vigorously in favor of student unions and it has been a common observation that these groups flourish when student unions are in place. There are a lot of people in our institutions who advocate student unions on the basis of their existence and functioning in many developed countries. Student unions in developed countries are entirely and strictly indigenous student bodies having absolutely no relationship with any national or regional political pressure groups. With such a composition, these unions serve the students of the specific institutions in which they operate. They have no plans, intentions, or functions that relate to national or regional politics.
Editor’s Note: Since the establishment of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in 2002, the higher education sector in Pakistan has undergone a transformation both in its size and its nature. Dr. Sohail Naqvi, the Executive Director of the HEC, has been at the helm of many of these changes. STEP’s student editor Mariyam Khalid recently sat down with Dr. Naqvi to learn more about the HEC and its mandate. In the second of this two part interview, the scope of the HEC’s mandate and its policy-making procedures are discussed. The interview concludes with Dr. Naqvi’s vision for the future of the HEC.
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.
Campus Career Portal Initiative: An Attempt to Align the Academia and Industry in Pakistan
July 6, 2009
Yesterday, The News International ran a four page special on ROZEE.PK, Pakistan’s (self-proclaimed) #1 job website. Their Campus Career Portal Initiative, a project started by ROZEE.PK to link the academia and the industry in Pakistan, in particular caught my eye. This project is being funded by the National ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) R&D Fund under the Ministry of Information Technology. The proposal for this project introduces the project as follows (the complete proposal is available here):
“The Campus Career Portal Initiative proposes an efficient, scalable, and distributed system of matching students, academia and industry to achieve industry-funded research projects and industry demand recruitment. It will also generate invaluable statistics, and effectively match graduates within their respective industries with pinpoint accuracy.”
