Karachi University (KU) has rejected the ranking of Pakistani universities announced by the Higher Education Commission on Thursday.
The commission did not mention KU among the overall top 10 universities of the country, but regarded it as the second best after the University of Punjab in the category of ‘general universities’. None of the public sector universities from Sindh made it to the overall top 10 list.
According to pro vice chancellor of KU, Prof. Dr Shahana Urooj Kazmi, the commission does not have the right to rank the universities since it is a funding agency. “Yet, they devised a controversial criterion for ranking universities to promote private institutions,” she said. “We do not agree with it.”
Dr Kazmi found it “inexplicable” that KU was not included in the overall top 10 list. “The irony is that the HEC graded a few institutions whose degrees are not even accepted by KU,” said Kazmi. “The degrees awarded by KU are accepted world over.”
She alleged that the commission decided to lower the name of prestigious public-sector institutions by putting apples and oranges in the same basket, giving the examples of Aga Khan University (AKU) and Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU), which in her view did not even qualify as complete universities. “AKU is still not more than a college of medicine and QAU only offers post-graduate programmes,” she reasoned.
Dr Kazmi said that an institute has to have at least four faculties to be called a university. She said that KU was incomparable to institutions like AKU and QAU with their nine faculties, 17 research institutes and around 28,000 students. “We have introduced a number of programmes in various disciplines which are first of its kind in the country,” she said.
She believed that the institutions which fulfilled the necessary and unnecessary demands of the commission remained in HEC’s good books as compared to KU which resisted the unnecessary intervention of the commission in academic and management affairs because it has its own statuary forums for taking decisions.
The commission announced the ranking of universities in the country on the basis of quality teaching and research. The HEC’s criteria for ranking universities includes, the numbers of students enrolled, the bachelors, masters and PhD graduates produced and qualified faculty members. The criterion also takes the student-teacher ratio, quality of researches produced and published in international journals, physical and technological infrastructure, international collaborations, resource generation and sports facilities of an institution into account.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 25th, 2012.
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Karachi is by far the most educated city of Pakistan with the best educational institutes.