Tasks before the new HEC chief

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) is to get a new head, and the prime minister has decided in principle to appoint Dr Shams Kassim-Lakha as its new chief. This is a welcome and timely appointment. Dr Kassim-Lakha comes with impeccable credentials. He is politically non-aligned but reportedly maintains good cross-party relations and contacts, as well as an extensive network in academia, both local and international. The proposed appointment, unusually, appears to be universally popular. He has been closely involved in the development of ranking methodologies via the HEC Quality Assurance Committee, and in 2002, chaired the taskforce that worked at the uplift of education, not only higher education, across the country. His history of engagement with the HEC over many years gives him a depth and breadth of perception that bodes well for the institution’s future.

Higher education suffers from the dual blights of underinvestment and political interference. ‘Scandals’ involving faculty members in cases of plagiarism regularly surface, there are questions about the quality of teaching — in particular at PhD level — and nepotism and corruption in appointment processes in universities across the country. The HEC has oversight of 132 universities and other institutions, with an enrollment figure of 948,268 (2010) of which an encouraging 45 per cent are female. The aggregated figure has, in all likelihood, passed a million in 2013 or about one in every 190 of the population, a significant percentage. The HEC’s head, thus carries a crucial burden — the development of the minds and skills of a generation that will go on to power a Pakistan that aspires to a knowledge-based economy but which struggles at the most basic level to provide a primary education for most of its children. It is hoped that Dr Kassim-Lakha will be given the power and freedoms necessary to develop this vital institution and that party politics will take a back seat.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 4^th, 2013.

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