How Not to Reform Universities

Educational planners in Pakistan have rediscovered an old, and now wearily familiar trick -- declare a target, cook up some numbers, and announce progress. To deflect criticism that 98% of the eligible population has no access to universities, they have decided to create fake ones. By a stroke of some bureaucrat's pen, the "University of Malakand" has now been deemed to exist. Malakand is a largely illiterate tribal area populated by men with guns and beards. By similar diktats, there is now a "Hazara University", "Kohat University", and a score of others splattered across the country.

There are no indications of any conscience at work. Decades ago, departments of theoretical science were set up in educationally undeveloped areas such as D.I.Khan, Jamshoro, Multan, Khairpur, Khuzdar, and so forth. Their failure was assured even before the first brick was laid and, indeed, those departments never functioned. Today all it takes is a piece of paper from the University Grants Commission and some paint. Some colleges have had their signboards taken down for repainting, and been put back up changed into "universities" the next day. By such slight of hand the current tally of public universities is now officially 41, up from the 23 officially listed in 1996.

Given this mendacity, one was entitled to expect that the widely advertised blueprint for resuscitating Pakistan's universities, the "Report Of The Task Force On Improvement Of Higher Education In Pakistan", would have had something important to say on these matters. The "Lakha Report" - known by the Task Force chairman, Dr Shams Kassim Lakha, president of the Aga Khan University - follows in the footsteps of earlier reports. It has the virtue of being the most comprehensive and well-articulated report yet. Unfortunately, it is silent on the issue of exploding university numbers, as on a host of other contentious but vital matters.

The Lakha Report is a litany of fairly standard and uncontestable complaints, some useful data, and a repertoire of obvious and reasonable solutions. But it fails to provide a credible action plan or strategy, and refuses to assign priorities. There is no attempt made to distinguish between the necessary and the desirable, the urgent and the optional. Fundamentally the Report's weakness comes from the desire to steer a politically safe course and to not tell the whole truth.

What does university reform really need? For this it is necessary to understand the present situation in some detail.

Talking of a "crisis" of higher education hopelessly understates the situation. Decades of sustained mismanagement have reduced our public universities to intellectual rubble. The evidence is stark - in this country of 150 million people, there are perhaps fewer than 20 computer scientists of sufficient caliber who could possibly get tenure-track positions at some B-grade US university. In physics, even if one roped in every competent physicist in the country, we could not staff one single good department of physics. As for mathematics: to say that there are even 5 real mathematicians in Pakistan would be exaggerating their numbers. The social sciences are only a little better.

Even by the standards of Iran and India, Pakistan does not possess one single good public university. Official statistics cannot hide the truth. In year 2000, Pakistani scientists - in all universities and research institutes combined - published a total of 670 scientific papers. This is less than the number annually published by the faculty of one single medium-sized US university. To tell the whole truth, most Pakistani publications are of little worth and never cited. They could just as well have not been written. On campuses, serious discussions of scientific, philosophic, social, or political issues are virtually non-existent.

It is true that some learning does take place in some of our universities and quite a few noteworthy individuals, who have achieved international distinction in their professions, are among the graduates. But the trend is for less and less learning, and fewer and fewer people able to make their way in the wider world. The especially gifted and motivated persons will, of course, always find their way to the top. Such people succeed not because of the system but in spite of it; once in a while an Abdus Salam will be born and make his way to Stockholm for a Nobel Prize. However, it is difficult to imagine a system in the modern world which has greater antipathy to intellectual inquiry than the one which presently exists in Pakistan.

So, what is the way out? Is there one? Without radical and painful surgery our universities shall continue to be lifeless in all but name. Whether the patient will permit the surgery is another matter, but substantive reform would require implementation of hugely unpopular steps such as the following:

First, the number of general universities offering M.Sc and beyond in subjects such as physics, mathematics, biology, economics, anthropology, etc. needs to be sharply reduced and only the relatively better ones retained. Those few retained should be upgraded by infusing large amounts of resources, financial and intellectual. All the other universities should focus on technical training, offering programs of study and courses with direct economic utility. The explosion in university numbers needs to be urgently reversed.

Unfortunately, the Lakha Report is silent on this key point. But logically, there is no other choice. There is simply not enough competent manpower available in Pakistan, or enough qualified Pakistanis overseas, to properly teach the arts and sciences at all places that we now call universities. This is not a temporary difficulty and cannot be fixed simply by increasing salaries or by any other means. The small pool of competent faculty needs to be concentrated, not diffused. A similar argument can be made for students: the poor quality of incoming students, which is a consequence of the even larger crisis at the pre-university level, means that the pool of students who can meaningfully take advantage of university instruction is very small.

Reducing the number of general universities may appear to be unfair to some provinces. But to convert Pakistan's non-functioning public universities into skill centres, with instruction in various trades (information technology, textile designing, electronics, plastics, refrigeration, etc) will give many more people the chance to acquire real skills that they may successfully barter for a decent wage. This is far better than teaching students to parrot high-level science which they cannot comprehend or use. At the same time by creating a few real universities we will have kept open the doors to a meaningful experience of higher education.

A second crucial reform requires termination of the present system wherein automatic life-long tenure is given to every university teacher and administrative employee. The consequences of instant tenure stare us in the face today. On the one hand Pakistan's universities lack an academic community but, on the other, there are plenty of teachers teaching subjects they couldn't care less about, and who are at complete liberty to convey their confusion and ignorance to students. Most teachers never consult a textbook, choosing to dictate from notes they saved from the time when they were students in the same department. Promotions are time-bound and automatic; incompetence is the most minor of sins and no university teacher has ever been punished for not knowing his subject. Everyone receives a full salary until retirement.

The Lakha Report does recognize the need to rethink the tenure system, and should be commended for that. Indeed, a solution might be to have only 3-5 year contract appointments, renewable only after thorough scrutiny of performance. Permanent tenure should be reserved for only 20-30% of the university faculty. A sizable fraction of the present teaching community, which does not meet minimum quality requirements, should be given the golden handshake and asked to move on, as is the practice when a state-owned enterprise is closed down or divested.

The crucial question in doing away with the tenure system is: how is performance to be measured in the arts and sciences? And, how can displaced teachers be usefully re-trained and re-employed? No one wants a social explosion, but it is also clear that the present system must be abolished. One wishes that these issues, which go to the heart of reform, had found consideration in the Report.

A third reform, also critically needed, is to make mandatory a country-wide university admissions test, and do away with selective quotas. The student quality in our public universities is extremely low but we need reliable procedures to procedures to weed out the worst. Iran and India have had such centralized systems in place for their universities, and there is no reason for Pakistan - where cheating and rote memorization have made local board examinations irrelevant indicators - to not have the same. It is also rather certain that most universities in Pakistan do not have the capacity to design reliable entrance tests.

Unfortunately the Lakha Report makes an ill-considered decision against such a centralized national system and makes only a weak, essentially unimplementable demand, that there should be a reliable assessment of school education.

The Lakha Report has grave shortcomings, the chief amongst these being a lack of clarity and direction. Nevertheless it is well-intentioned, has forced public attention towards university reform, and is a definite step forward. The criticisms directed against it by some university academic staff associations reveal a lurking fear that their free lunches may not be forever. Hysterical allegations that the Report is part of a deep-seated World Bank and IMF conspiracy reveal the intellectual bankruptcy of the accusers.

Much will have to be done if the public universities in Pakistan are to ever emerge as useful institutions for societal progress. Far larger financial resources will have to be committed, large-scale faculty training programs initiated, and responsible academic leadership found. Otherwise they shall remain, as at the present time, largely parasitical and irrelevant, useful to none, and deeply harmful to the students that they fail to educate.