Decaying educational institutions
The writer is a professor serving in the Department of Management Sciences at SZABIST, Karachi. He can be reached at isran@szabist.edu.pk
Institutional development holds key to national progress. Unfortunately though, in our country no serious efforts have been made to build institutions. Instead, we have systematically destroyed them one after another for personal gains. As a result, our institutions are decaying and have become a new source of misery and mayhem for the common people.
The history of the evolution of institutions in our country is extremely bitter. No effort has been made by our rulers to establish inclusive institutions. Economic logic of institutions demands that they must serve people efficiently and effectively, but in our country political logic overwhelms the economic logic, and institutions are used by politicians as a tool to serve their own interests.
This has a crippling effect on the functionality of institutions across the spectrum. Generally speaking, administrative and financial institutions can recover in a short time if corrective measures are taken. But when educational institutions collapse, it leads to an avalanche effect that is disastrous for the entire nation and future generations in terms of intellectual, social and scientific evolution. Someone once rightly said, “If you want to destroy any nation, destroy its education”. Interestingly, no external forces are involved in this. It is rather the doing of our very own ruling elite who seems to believe that if the masses get educated and empowered, they will stand up against them one day.
Educational institutions are vital to national development, but in our country most of them are suffering from decline and decay due to bad governance and political interference. Bad governance is the obvious outcome of political interference in educational institutions. Vice chancellors of universities are mostly appointed on a political basis to serve the interests of their political masters. It is thus no wonder that most of our universities have turned into job factories rather than centres of learning and research.
Today, original research is almost non-existent. Whatever research work is produced is a rehash of research done elsewhere. Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy has written a lot on this.
Universities around the world work to experiment on societal challenges and offer solutions to mechanise — and now digitise — different production processes. This way, the world has witnessed continuous mechanical and digital revolutions, totally transforming human relations and socioeconomic structures of societies. It is the educational institutions that are the centers of these revolutionary innovations. Even today, when the world is suffering from the Covid-19 pandemic, universities around the world are working to enlighten research to support the development of a vaccine, but no or little work is being done at our universities towards vaccine development. We initially heard that research is being performed on the vaccine but later found out that only Covid-19 tests had been administered. If this is the truth, then what is the difference between a diagnostic lab and university research centers on which where millions of rupees are spent.
Nowhere else in the world do universities face such a level of political interference that appointments of even VCs are made under political pressure; contracts are awarded on whims and wishes, indicating a clear conflict of interest; and even land grabbers, casting an evil eye on university lands, are overlooked due to their political connections.
No societies can progress without education. It was in this context that Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff in the 1990s presented the ‘Triple Helix Model’, visualising University-Industry-Government collaboration, with the aim of fostering economic and social development, and finally cruising towards a knowledge economy and knowledge society. The triple helix innovation framework has been widely adopted and applied by policymakers in developed and emerging economies.
But unfortunately, we don’t see anything like that happening in Pakistan. We hope that our policymakers prioritise education over all else, and work to rebuild and reform our educational institutions which are decaying in the cesspool of bad governance.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 22nd, 2020.
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