Not quite a quiet revolution

Pointing out low quality pre-university education, got lecture on HEC quality improvement cells, a bureaucratic reply.

Reacting to my article of November 4, the Higher Education Commission (HEC) chairman has claimed that in the last two years, a period coextensive with his own tenure, there has been a quiet revolution in higher education (November 12). Not quite, I am sorry to have to say. The period witnessed noisy vice chancellors acting like a trade union to protect their share of the pie. In sharp contrast, poor school teachers were lathi charged by police for demanding the promised pay raises. The chairman, a learned person of great integrity, has said things that have caused me immense disappointment. It disregards the main point of my article, contains factual errors and disputes the numbers given on the HEC website in his signature message. The message is gender insensitive and disparages social sciences much like his overbearing predecessor, Professor Attaur Rahman. What we have is the standard brief of the HEC on quality enhancement that gives me the feeling that he left it to some clueless PR person.

The main point of the article, based on research done in the UK, was that the poor have little access to quality higher education not just because they are poor — a disadvantage that to some extent can be overcome through state assistance — but because they are poor also in pre-university educational quality. I was just throwing up this point for educationists, the HEC not excluded, to ponder. Instead, I get a lecture on the great things that the HEC has done to improve quality in its member universities. I wish them all the success, though a visit to any university at random will be quite revealing: Far from being a developing culture, it is a matter left to quality enhancement cells. This is a typical bureaucratic response. You mention a problem and they will quickly set up a cell to employ some more bureaucrats, while the problem is pushed down a dark cellar.

A little more reflection on the main point would have led the HEC to appreciate the complexity resulting from the interdependence of access and quality. But then the HEC’s obsession with quantitative access continues. Sadly, the understanding of the quantitative is as poor as that of the qualitative. The chairman says that access is “now 7.8 per cent and not 5.1 per cent as implied by Dr Tahir.” I had taken the figure of 5.1 per cent from the chairman’s own message on the HEC website. Even as I write, the figure is still there! It may have improved since the chairman’s message was drafted, but keeping a website updated is also a matter of maintaining some quality. Still on numbers, the chairman says expenditure on higher education is only 0.22 per cent of GDP and not what I have stated. He seems to think only the HEC spends on higher education. He should know that provinces have not abandoned the field. The precise expenditure by the HEC is 0.244 per cent in 2010-11 and the addition of provincial expenditure would bring it close to what I estimated.

The message of the chairman on the HEC website contains this remarkable statement: “the HEC will improve equitable access by introducing soft disciplines, such as social sciences, media and journalism and fine arts to cater more to the female population so gender parity is further reduced.” Reducing gender parity! I wonder if any social scientist worth his/her salt would agree that he/she is practicing a soft, meaningless scientific discipline. And if the chairman does not accept the friendly advice of removing this paragraph from his message, reminiscent of the anthropological fantasies of the 1870s, he will soon be facing protests from women’s groups.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 18^th, 2011.