Restructuring higher education

Making HEC focus solely on innovation, research, scholarship, we can take away the political baggage it carries.

The space for reason and rational discourse in the country is disappearing fast. Arguments and disagreements are often settled by a violent resolve to silence dissent. In these trying times, higher education needs to play an even greater role in creating and perhaps more importantly, maintaining space for reason and debate. At the same time, both access to, and quality of, institutions of higher education, need to become a priority for the government. This is not just about keeping the pre-election promises – it is about saving the post-election society.

The national custodian of higher education, the Higher Education Commission (HEC), continues to face battles that it should not be involved in. On the one hand, the commission continues to serve without a head, and on the other, provinces want to disintegrate and create their own versions of the HEC. But there is a bigger question that needs to be answered here, a question often lost in the noise. What exactly is the mission of the HEC? As I am equally confused as others about the mission and the vision, I decided to educate myself and looked at the most obvious place, the HEC website. There, I found nothing of the sort that would clearly and succinctly tell me what the mission and vision is. The only thing I found after snooping around in sub-pages was a vague statement about the Lahore regional centre of the HEC stating that the mission of the regional centre was, “to facilitate institutions of higher learning to serve as an engine of socio-economic development of Pakistan.” This made me even more confused. If this is the mission of the Lahore regional centre, what about HEC as a whole? What about other regional centres?

My problem with the HEC is not what little it is doing, but that it is trying to do too much and as a result, is often viewed with suspicion by politicians and non-politicians alike. I am yet to find any organisation of higher learning in the world that simultaneously verifies degrees (and gets into trouble for doing that), plays a central role in setting the curriculum, determines who is “an approved professor” and who is not, supposedly sets the national research agenda, awards research grants to individuals and institutions, and then ranks them based on criteria developed by a newspaper abroad. Add the smoke-screens of the Eighteenth Amendment to the mix and you don’t even know who should be in charge of the process –– the federation or the provinces? The net result of this concoction of political motives, bitterness, confusion and corruption is something that is both unappetising and unfit to cure the ills of an ailing society.

I believe that while highlighting and emphasising the need for quality higher education, we should revisit the mission and the goals. An institution setting the national research agenda should not be in the business of verifying degrees. That should be done by individual universities. What needs more autonomy is not the provinces, but the institutions of higher learning across the country that should have the freedom to set the curriculum (with some broad guidelines). Tenure (or absence of it) should not be mandated or regulated by the HEC, but instead by universities themselves by setting clear policies for excellence and promotion.

I am not one to argue that we need more bureaucratic structures, but I certainly believe that the existing ones need to be lean with clearly defined goals and accountability. By empowering institutions and not overstretched and cash-strapped national regulatory bodies, we need to allow universities to be creative in their ability to stay financially viable and at the same time, more efficient in attracting top-quality students. By making the HEC an institution that focuses solely on national innovation, research and scholarship, we can take away the back-breaking political baggage it currently carries. Perhaps then, the prime minister and his team will not need eight months to name the next chairperson.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 1^st, 2014.

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