HEC: doing too much?

Perhaps the reason there is disappointment is not because HEC is not doing enough, maybe it is trying to do too much.

In another world, the fact that the high court said that the government overstepped its authority in removing the HEC chairperson would have led to resignations. That is unlikely to happen in the current environment. So in the meantime, let us celebrate and hope — celebrate that there is a chairperson at HEC, who has been reinstated to do his job; and hope that we will not see any effort to undermine the already fragile system.

HEC has been criticised by many in not living up to its promise. The complaints range from the pace of processes to new policies that may seem ad hoc to some. The list of complaints by the stakeholders is long to list here, but perhaps the real reason there is such disappointment is not because HEC is not doing enough. Maybe it is trying to do too much.

Let us, for example, take the chronic issue of plagiarism in research publications that HEC has been trying to address for some time. In part, this corruption in our midst is driven by financial incentives where more publications mean a financial reward and job stability for a university researcher. This is due to the ill-designed policy in early years of HEC where in order to boost publication numbers, and to incentivise scholars to publish, financial rewards were created. Publishing an individual paper resulted in an actual cash award. It is not hard to figure out that such a system is both flawed and is easy to game. Today, HEC spends its precious resources trying to clean up the mess of its own past. How well they work is a topic of separate discussion but a question should be asked whether the higher education commission — designed to foster a culture of scholarship and innovation — should be in the business of checking whether an individual university researcher copied the work of another colleague, or published it in a predatory journal. Should a federal agency be doing that? Can this not be done at the institutional level?

A visit to the HEC website gives us a clue of what all HEC has been trying to do. It seems more like a customer service portal than an institution that aims to promote the culture of research. The website is an unorganised laundry list of policies, news releases, job openings and workshops to name a few. It is simultaneously a body that manages exams (by publishing answer key to recent exams), provides information to parents about institutions that are giving unrecognised degrees, has information about assessment tests and gives instructions on how to attest laminated documents. The Urdu website prominently displays links from conferences in 2016 (listed under latest news and information).

While there is a lot of information on the website, nowhere on the website (in English or in Urdu) is there any information about the vision of the institution, the challenges that the country’s higher education community needs to tackle, and what is planned to address those challenges. It provides no reason to the visitor to believe that the institution has anything to do with research and scholarship. It has no description of research efforts that are currently supported or what might be priority areas in the near future. It fails to mention success stories that have been enabled through HEC funds and does not provide any information about the history of the institution.

In my conversations with family, colleagues and collaborators in the higher education sector, and with friends and family who are currently students, HEC represents different things to different people. There is little overlap between their perceptions that range from a body that validates documents to one that sets research agenda, from an institution that creates a statute for tenure-track appointments to one that publishes exam results. Invariably — in trying to do everything for everyone — it disappoints most. Perhaps — as the chairperson reflects on a second chance to foster a culture of scholarship — he could imagine an institution that does a few things, but does them really well.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 1^st, 2022.

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