For Dr Hoodbhoy, fake PhDs are worse than fake currency

As Dr Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy drew an analogy between the abundance of substandard PhDs in Pakistan and the fake currency notes, he volleyed home past former state bank governor Dr Ishrat Husain, in order to register his point before an audience that was all ears. “You have raised a very difficult question,” replied Dr Husain modestly.

On the second day of the fifth Karachi Literature Festival, Dr Hoodbhoy, along with other prominent educationists, was speaking at a jam-packed session dedicated to discussing the goal of higher education in creating professionals or scholars, moderated by Aamir R Mufti, an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of California.



Dr Hoodbhoy defined a ‘professional’ as a person whose skills are needed to keep the society functioning while a ‘scholar’ goes beyond that by taking up the responsibility of further development of knowledge by researching arcane subjects or looking at new dimensions of existing subjects.


What worries Hoodbhoy, in the context of Pakistani society, is the existing state of both the academia and the professionals. “Although there is a very large number of people with very high degrees, and that number is increasing by leaps and bounds every year, yet the quality of proficiency and competency seems to be decreasing with time rather than increasing.”

Instead of offering some anecdotal evidence from his vast experience of teaching at Pakistani universities, he preferred to put before the audience what they had personally experienced - the embarrassing episode about a man named Agha Waqar - a ‘proud Pakistani’ who claimed to have invented something called a ‘water car-kit’ in 2012.

For Hoodbhoy, the evidence of our cumulative decline was the failure of national universities in raising a strong case to debunk a simplistic fraud despite having an abundance of PhDs in science, who, otherwise, boast of publishing research papers, amounting to no less than a couple of thousand every year. “What are we supposed to do with such kind of PhDs and how will they contribute to our national scholarship when they will become PhD supervisors of our young students?”

For Dr Husain, who is presently dean and director at the Institute of Business Administration, the solution for bringing a balance between quality and quantity lies in retracing the whole value chain of education that begins from the primary level and reach to culmination at the institutes of higher education. “There is a trade off between access and quality. In any setup where access has to be increased, you will have quality issues,” Dr Husain explained. “These issues can, however, be curbed by fostering our children’s foundational knowledge, which remains disappointing till this day.”

Ismat Riaz, an educationist with 30 years of teaching, teacher training and curriculum development, agreed. She pointed out that merely focusing on degrees rather than intellectualism has degraded us to the current crisis. An alternative curriculum for a strong primary education and a ‘real university culture’ are a prerequisite for both the professionalism and scholarship, she stressed.

“Each of these ideals - professionalism and scholarship - includes aspects of the other as the scholars after all are required to have a certain kind of comportment and professional standard to live up to,” said Abbas Rashid, who convenes the Campaign for Quality Education - a network of organisations and individuals involved in collaborative research in the education sector.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 9^th, 2014.