at birth, Pakistan inherited the Panjab University in Lahore, which was the only one of the 16 universities of the Raj. Seventy-five years later, there are over 120 officially recognized universities. Almost the same number of unrecognized institutions are self-declared educational universities. The number of colleges has increased from 30-35 to 1,500 or more. Higher education has taken off – or so it seems.
Commonly Telling Signs of Success: Most universities claim lists with PhDs against each teacher’s name and offer a large number of doctoral degrees. Research is flourishing. A half-joke is that professors are publishing so many research papers and books these days that they don’t even have time to read what they write. But really, this is no joke!
A superstar professor with the highest Pakistani national award is credited with 1,000 math research papers over three years – almost one per day. Another publishes an average of 25 thick books (about one per two weeks) in chemistry research each year and dozens of papers annually. In 2020, Stanford University reportedly selected 81 Pakistani scientists out of 159,683 scientists from around the world. Myth Remains Though Stanford Flattened denied Report.
For all these ‘successes’, the stench of intellectual decay prevails within the campuses. Ask a prolific writer to present your research work to an informed audience and hackles before they arise. Rare are professors, deans, or vice chancellors who read books for pleasure or can intelligently debate a current academic topic. Most people can’t name the last serious book they read, imagined or otherwise.
Scholarly discourse is rare and even basic competencies can be difficult to find at universities.
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Rare are also professors who deliver an academic lecture in syntactically correct Urdu or English. A poor mix is common for this linguistically troubled country. writing skills? Even with smartphones and computers fixed, it’s not always easy to understand what a professor or student really wants to say. Brilliant exceptions exist but, of course, there are exceptions.
Academic poverty is more visible when crossing softer areas like business administration and digital marketing towards harder areas like maths and physics. In those 20-30 university departments that teach difficult subjects, only a few dozen professors can solve 12th grade A-level math-physics problems or compete with a good pre-university Vietnamese student .
The social sciences and liberal arts are in relatively better shape. But professors and students should worry about red lines. Appealing to abstract principles of academic freedom won’t help because ‘imported’ Western concepts are despised. An example is the discipline of philosophy. It requires unfettered freedom to explore. Despite nine philosophy departments, can one name a Pakistani philosopher who has been accepted by the international community of philosophers?
An even simpler, ugly side: Some universities sell degrees under the counter, professors demand money from students in exchange for grades, increase personal income by fixing administrator appointments, and sexual harassment is okay as long as it’s too much. Do not appear Although the student body is highly religious, regular in prayer and eager for blasphemers, most are comfortable cheating on exams.
Surveying the landscape of this broken system, one asks: Who created the terrifying intellectual deserts that are seldom closed by oasis? History answers.
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Living in the dream world of old glories, two centuries ago the Muslims of North India had died against modern secular education and the flow of new European ideas. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s heroic efforts to fight for science, English language and modern education met with some success but not enough. His Aligarh Muslim University, the so-called “Arsenal of Muslim India”, eventually became the further base for the Pakistan Movement. However, contrary to their expectations, AMU failed to become Oxford or Cambridge.
Acceptance of non-madrasa education was slow and spiteful. Came too late At the time of partition, most of the professors were Hindus who fled to India after the riots started. The abandoned senior positions were immediately seized by junior Muslim professors and lecturers. Bypassing due process, political appointments allowed academic mediocrity to become department heads, deans and vice-chancellors. The new gatekeepers were always skeptical about potential challenges to their authority. Thus, each new generation lags behind the previous generation. A degenerative cycle explains the current.
To fix, two different directions were taken. First, after General Musharraf joined the war on terrorismThe US dollar rained from the sky. All the earlier objections to government spending by negligence evaporated. New universities and new buildings sprung up together with new pay scales for professors, cash to publish papers, stipends for PhDs, foreign scholarships, and fantastic new equipment.
Second, and more recently, in the name of discipline and organization, the leadership of some large universities was handed over to retired military officers. There are now many such prominent ones in the universities of Islamabad. These retirees have created souped-up versions of the cadet colleges they attended in Hasanabad and Kohat. dress and hairstyles are tightly controlled, So are the thoughts.
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What’s the way ahead? If the genie smoking from Aladdin’s lamp somehow appeared and asked me three wishes, here’s my list:
First of all, I want Pakistani professors to turn into an ethical community. This means not rewarding or penalizing a student for any reason other than academic performance; Don’t pretend you know the answer to a question you don’t really know; Do not publish a research paper unless it has something new and important to say; Don’t defend your friends once you are caught; And don’t think you’re entitled to your salary unless you’ve actually worked for it.
Second, I wish that we would all be excited by the vast amount of knowledge generated during the day. Then each of us will constantly struggle for self-education and self-education. In a world of incredibly rapid change, the university degree you earned yesterday doesn’t make sense today. Unless professors keep up with their changing field, they cannot motivate their students.
Third, I want all teachers and administrators to recognize their moral responsibility to produce young adults who can think for themselves. This means that the still dominant authoritarian traditions of teaching must go. Rather than automatically being entitled to respect by students, every teacher must earn it by demonstrating a high level of maturity and knowledge.
I hope the genie will fulfill my wishes. But I can’t find that magic lamp.
The author is an Islamabad-based physicist and author. Thoughts are personal.
this article was originally published In the morning