Universities as supermarkets

Sometime ago I was sitting with a deputy chairman of the Planning Commission of Pakistan when a vice chancellor (VC) of a public-sector university came to see him.

After the usual niceties, the VC brought up that he needed one billion rupees to establish another campus of his university. Sitting up in his chair, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission asked him how many full professors he had in his economics department.

While the VC struggled to come up with a number, the excited deputy chairman opened up the university’s website and went on the department’s faculty page and started counting. Three full professors, he exclaimed. Then he turned to the VC and asked him if he was establishing a university or creating branches of a departmental store chain. He pointed out that in a university department where there are only three professors, how could the VC even think of expanding to another campus.

Then he showed him department pages of leading world universities where each department had dozens of full professors, pointing out that you need a critical mass of expertise in each department for it to excel and that only after it has reached a certain level can an expansion be even contemplated. A decade after this conversation, the model for universities in Pakistan remains that of a departmental store chain, and nothing else.

Recently, someone asked me what the difference was between a college and a university. While there are several differences, I pointed out that the central difference was that the university ‘created knowledge’ and a college ‘taught that knowledge.’ This is yet another distinction we have lost in Pakistan.

It has now been over twenty years since the creation of the Higher Education Commission (HEC), an organization which was set to revolutionize the education sector in Pakistan. While there have certainly been improvements in several areas, yet our dream of creating the IITs and IIMs of Pakistan, and other centres of excellence remains a pipedream. This is despite the fact that billions of dollars have been pumped into the field, the number of universities, both public and private has quadrupled, and there are now thousands with PhDs in the country (though an increasing number of them do not have jobs).

Why has the situation improved but not substantially enough during the last two decades? Mainly for the two reasons elucidated above.

When the HEC was formed, its leaders wanted to improve numbers – of universities, those with PhDs, student enrollment in higher education, etc. While this was initially a good idea, decades later the focus is still on numbers. Governments gauge their success not by the excellence of universities, but by the number of new universities they have chartered. The recent bonanza both in Punjab and in the federal parliament where several dozen university charters were bulldozed through is nothing new.

Such practices have been done piecemeal throughout the last two decades, as substandard colleges were raised to university level and dubious private organizations given charters. For a country which does not already spend enough on education the dilution of the already scarce resources in this way is simply criminal, and leads to still-born institutions.

Furthermore, our understanding of universities is deeply flawed. The simple yardstick of ‘creating knowledge’ has not been the benchmark of either the HEC or most university leaders in the country. The fixation with numbers has meant that the vast majority of scientists in our country produce papers which no one reads, do research where there is no original and creative work, and collaborate with random people only to go on junkets or waste money. In the social sciences and humanities, conditions are even worse, as the science and engineering focused yardstick of the HEC and other funding agencies means that they hardly get any funds to do any research and have to constantly justify their existence, let alone do any creative work.

This lack of focus on creating knowledge has led to the ‘departmental store chain’ mentality, where as long as some basics are ensured (if that even) a new institution is set up. This approach not only leads to substandard education for the students, but dilutes the critical mass of faculty needed for the further creation of knowledge. No wonder then that in the example above, a department with just three full professors was ready to be expanded to another campus.

The result of this twin focus on just numbers and the lack of a research culture creating knowledge will be catastrophic for our country. While it will continue to stifle the real development of universities, as most in the public sector would be competing for an ever-smaller share of resources, and faculty mass would be so diluted as to make real research impossible, the real losers will be our young people. With two-thirds of our population under the age of 35, and with over a million in higher education, we are simply perpetuating a fraud upon them through this system of education.

We are giving them a useless piece of paper masked as a degree, providing them with a false sense of security that they are now ‘graduates’, and are setting them up for not only disappointment but resentment in later life where they will suffer the consequences of this substandard education.

These ‘half-educated’ people will be bad for themselves and their country, and will give rise to more social tensions, strife and uncertainty. Certainly, not educating people to a higher degree level is preferable to the creation of a whole generation of half-educated people. With such a proliferation of universities, and an ever-increasing number of enrollments, time is fast running out to fix the situation, else it will lead to the ruin of all.

The writer is an historian based in Lahore. He tweets/posts

@BangashYK and can be contacted at: yaqoob.bangash@gmail.com