Academic corruption

Times Higher Education (THE) is one of a number of organizations that compiles annual university rankings for universities around the globe.

A few days ago, it released its rankings for 2021. This year, its ranking of Asian universities includes 16 Pakistani universities in the top 500. The first nine Pakistani universities and their ranks in the list are Quaid-e-Azam University (Asia #100), Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan (#124), COMSATS University Islamabad (#171), University of Peshawar (#201–250), University of Agriculture, Faisalabad (#251-300), Government College University Faisalabad (#251-300), Lahore University of Management Sciences - LUMS (#251-300), National University of Sciences and Technology - NUST (#251-300) and University of the Punjab (#301-350). Rankings, including the Times Higher Education university rankings, are built on scoring systems with a high degree of arbitrariness. Once it is understood what factors affect a ranking the most, a determined player can game it to come out on top.

You will notice in the ranking above that LUMS (Pakistan #7) and NUST (Pakistan #8), which in my opinion most students and parents would give their left leg to get into, are ranked lower than certain other universities at home. This just demonstrates the volatility and arbitrariness of scoring systems unable to accommodate qualitative differences.

In a corruption-ridden society like ours, such objective scoring mechanisms are often preferred, because they reduce space for personal biases and favoritism on behalf of decision makers. Higher-ed academia in Pakistan is rife with corruption. While many decisions have been made subject to checklists, points and scores, over the years many of those criteria have been gamed and broken.

Some years back an official at the HEC, let me call him Mr X, was developing a score-based criterion for an annual national award. Mr X delegated the task to a subordinate and gave him his own CV as well as those of two of his acquaintances, Mr Y and Mr Z, to demonstrate whatever criteria he would come up with. The subordinate went to work and came back with a scoring criterion. When it was applied to the sample profiles, Mr Z came out on top.

Not happy with the result, Mr X ordered his subordinate to work on it some more, and the subordinate went back to the drawing board. When he returned and brought back the second version, Mr Y’s profile scored highest. Still not satisfied, Mr X sent back his subordinate to make further changes. When he brought back the third version, Mr X’s profile, the superior he was presenting to, scored highest. This finally pleased Mr X, and the criterion was eventually approved for use.

Since Pakistani academia’s revamp in the early 2000s, publications, primarily journal papers, books and, to a lesser extent, conference papers, have become academic currency critical in appointment, promotion and award criteria. In my work with universities, I got a sense of how easily the current publication scoring system is manipulated and how it has led to a bizarre kind of corruption.

For example, professors at one of Punjab’s leading public universities shared how the journal mafia in their department operated. The department was split into two political camps. Whichever camp’s member was the journal’s editor s/he would strive to publish articles of members of his/her own camp, to the exclusion of members of the opposing camp.

Faculty members at a university in Sindh told me about informal understandings between universities running their own journals. Faculty members in one province, when up for tenure, would ask friends in the other university to publish them in their journal to meet the promotion requirement for the number of published articles. Down the road, such favors are returned and, thus, one hand washes the other.

If this scheme seems pedestrian, easily detectable and limited to journals and conferences of shady and questionable reputation, that is because it is. Internationally, this kind of corruption, like other things, is more advanced and more difficult to detect. A few days ago, Dr Michael L Littman published the findings of a study titled ‘Collusion Rings Threaten the Integrity of Computer Science Research’ in the Communications of the ACM. It describes how groups of authors essentially gate-crash the peer-review process of highly competitive and respected computer science conferences.

Another common practice is that of gift authorships. Gift authorship is the addition of a name to an article’s author list, sometimes in return for payment (paid authorships) or other favors. Faculty often direct their graduate students to add names of people on their articles – people who had provided no input on the work. These methods enable many mediocre faculty members to claim to have hundreds of publications to their name.

A doctoral student from a research institute in Karachi shared an unwritten rule of her institute: Every student must include the name of the director and another senior member of the institute as co-authors, regardless of whether they made any contribution or not. Refuse – and your career there is finished.

A common way to judge the impact a published work has had is by looking at its citation count: the number of times other people have mentioned it in their works. Shoddy articles do not get cited and devalue the articles that cite them. In order to avoid attracting scrutiny and raised eyebrows that come with a flood of articles but few or no citations, faculty members are now also artificially inflating their citation counts. A crude method is to cite one’s own article or self-cite. A less detectable approach is to join a citation cartel, a group of like-minded faculty members that share the same goal and who cite each other.

Journal mafias, fixed peer-review processes, gift authorships, paid authorships, coerced authorships by misuse of authority, self-citations, citation cartels, and (perhaps soon) collusion rings and many other forms of corruption are now deeply entrenched in Pakistan’s academic ecosystem.

In addition to bragging rights and longer-term benefits, like promotions and awards, there are also more immediate motivations for racking up publication counts. Many institutes incentivize journal and book publications by paying out per-article financial rewards. If you think that this amounts to petty corruption, consider an extreme case that occurred in the 2000s in which one academic first lobbied for a policy rewarding Rs200,000 per published article, then racking up 36 articles in a year to claim Rs72 lakh in publication rewards in a single year. This money grab was so blatant that the policy had to be rolled back quickly.

Twenty years after ushering in a system that evaluates the output of researchers based on quantity rather than quality, and with no significant tweaks since then, this academic culture, which produces mostly junk, is what it has wrought. Worse, it has a one-size-fits-all yardstick for productivity for all disciplines, be it science, literature, art, or design; and the yardstick is journal articles. Incentives and policies are so ill-devised that they encourage large quantities of journal articles with little regard to quality and no regard to how well or how poorly a faculty member teaches.

In university systems around the globe that we consider models, evaluations of faculty members’ contributions are more quality conscious, holistic and devolved not to university but department level. Depending on type of institution, evaluations may be more heavily weighted towards research, but also span contributions in teaching and institutional and community service.

Promotion decisions are made by a departmental ‘tenure committee’ composed of senior colleagues who are experts in their discipline. Committee members are kept honest by a desire to maintain their professional reputation for fairness and standards. In a culture of adherence to professional ethical norms like those of developed education systems from which we have borrowed a few elements of our policies, that has proven to be entirely sufficient. It forgoes a nationally centralized, rigid score-based system, largely blind to discipline of the kind we have in Pakistan.

Players, be they faculty members or universities, operating in a score-based system necessitated by a zero-trust environment will eventually figure out how to beat the game. Once they do that, you will see what we are seeing now: Players racking up high scores, resistant to change but little meaningful work to show for it. No wonder then that the people who built, perpetuated and are profiting from this system remain not only willfully blind to its faults and failings, but continue to tout its ‘accomplishments’ too.

The writer is an independent education researcher and consultant. She has a PhD in Education from Michigan State University.