The HEC cannot be excused for the mess it has created.
KARACHI: This is in reference to Rasul Bakhsh Rais’s article “What ails our public universities?” (September 20). The writer seems to blame the government for its apathy and 90 per cent of ‘ineligible’ teachers. I disagree. Before the cuts, public sector universities were given paltry sums. Grants per teacher to varsities in Pakistan is Rs1.7 million which is 100 times less than that of the universities in say the US which get over Rs120 million per teacher per year.
Also, blaming the government and teachers causes one to ignore the fact that it is the Pakistani ruling class which is equally to blame for the ruin the public sector universities find themselves in at the moment. For the past seven years these institutions have been run on reforms proposed by the World Bank and implemented by the Higher Education Commission (HEC). The result was that the public sector was weakened – at the expense of the private sector, which is favoured by Pakistan’s ruling class.
Moreover, the HEC cannot be excused for the mess it has created. It implemented all these reforms including new curriculum and new incentives for research in letter and spirit of what was asked by the World Bank. It is about time that the HEC’s own role in this was also investigated.
Dr Riaz Ahmed
Associate Professor
Department of applied chemistry
University of Karachi
Published in The Express Tribune, September 23rd, 2010.
