Both research and teaching have to go hand in hand in all universities.
KARACHI: This is with reference to Dr Tariq Rahman’s piece “Learning from Heidelberg” (July 22). The centrepiece of the old Humboldt ideal of higher education was the unity of teaching and research. Dr Rahman is proposing a division in higher education: a first class university with such a unity and a second class one without research or only secondary research. That would produce a majority of students who have finished higher education without the experience of how research is done and without access to the leading research faculty and ideas, while only a minority from that elite university would have that experience. I do not think that is a good idea.
Also, what is the use of a professor who is interested only in research because that is what counts for his career advancement and prestige and who does not care about teaching? Who doesn’t try hard to pass on and explain ideas that he is developing in his research to students? Both research and teaching have to go hand in hand in all universities. For this to happen, teaching and publishing loads have to be balanced, with nonsensical rules of presence in office and others to be relaxed.
A university is always a teaching place and teaching should be of good and decisive quality. We can have research institutes where the emphasis is on research only without any students or some PhD students only.
Germany has actually given up the Humboldt model in the course of European unification and the Bologna process. That is the tide of the time where students are encouraged to get a certificate of higher education in a minimum amount of time, which also means that they think about their GPAs more than about acquiring knowledge. This is what is going on Germany as much as in Pakistan.
Bettina Robotka
Published in The Express Tribune, July 23rd, 2013.
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