Issues in higher education

AN indisputably essential part of a university’s mission is to generate and disseminate knowledge. Think tanks perform these functions in our time, but they are not called universities. To merit that designation, the place has to supplement its assembly of scholars with students.

The administrative systems that manage universities do not form the core of the enterprise; they are no more than facilitators, called into being by the great enlargement of its scope and scale. Confucius, Plato and Aristotle, the ancient Jewish and Christian seminaries, and the madrassahs of our own great jurists — Imams Jafar-i-Sadiq, Abu Hanifa, Malik, Hunbal, and Shafa’I — and Nizam-al-Mulk’s celebrated madrassah in Baghdad where Imam Ghazali taught, provided learning without the assistance of any noteworthy administrative structures.

A commission recently investigated the state of higher education in Pakistan and submitted recommendations, which have apparently been well received by our government, but have invited intense disapproval of university and college teachers throughout the country. What are the points at issue?

There is first the philosophical question of whether young people have a right to education that the state must honour, and if so, to what extent. A consensus has developed in much of the civilized world that it is the state’s obligation to offer ten to twelve years of education to all children free, or virtually free, of cost to their parents. Free post-secondary education is not a right, but it is understood that the state should provide it to those who desire it, and are well enough prepared to benefit from it, either free of cost or at subsidized prices.

Furthermore, it is one of the generally accepted obligations of the state to participate in, and pay some of the cost of, advancing the frontiers of human knowledge. The people’s representatives in legislatures admit to these obligations by allocating funds for higher education in the state’s budget.

Preparedness to benefit from higher education is taken as a prerequisite for admission to colleges and universities. In most of the American states, for instance, applicants are required to take entry examinations, and they will not qualify for admission if they fall short of a certain score. In other places, including Pakistan, a certain level of performance in secondary education is normally expected.

The great majority of young people in England, Europe, and America do not expect to go to college or university after completing their secondary education, which may consist of ten or twelve years of schooling. The purpose of education at this stage is not to prepare students for specific jobs, but to give them the basic ability to deal with the world around them. They acquire relevant occupational skills in vocational schools or through apprenticeship. The prevailing view in our own country has it that, more than improving a young person’s mind, the purpose of education is to enable him/her to earn a living when he/she is ready to step out into the world.

The two goals are not mutually exclusive, but emphasis on the second is understandable, considering that our job market is extremely small. We must then address the question of what the “matriculates” or secondary school “graduates” are going to do with their lives before we limit their access to higher education. Our reformers, possessed of a fever called privatization, want to reduce the state’s role in the promotion of higher learning. They are thoughtlessly allowing themselves to be swept by the day’s fashionable gale.

Higher education in Pakistan is in a poor state. Its product is said to be poor, meaning that the students it turns out do not have an adequate understanding of their respective disciplines, and the contributions to the advancement of knowledge that their teachers make are much too modest. This is largely a problem in motivation. A great many of the students are in college because they had nothing better to do, because their parents did not want them staying home and making pests of themselves, or because somebody thought their job prospects would improve with a college degree, but not because they were interested in a certain subject of study and wanted to know more about it.

Teachers do not dedicate themselves to their work for a variety of reasons: they have entered the profession because doors to more prestigious and lucrative stations were closed to them, because they are not paid well enough, or because they can get away with doing less than they ought to do. Many of them have not read even a small fraction of the classics or the work of recent and contemporary celebrities in their fields. This state of affairs indicates that the system of rewards and punishments currently in place is not working.

As a general rule, one may say that university teachers should not be paid any less than public servants with similar educational attainments. But note that they enjoy benefits that civil servants do not have: an extended summer vacation in addition to public holidays, sick leave, and “casual” leave; a considerably lighter load of required work (six to nine hours of actual class room instruction plus a few hours of counselling and committee work per week). They do not have to contend with the same level of stress and tension in their work as civil servants and business executives do. The possibility of being pushed around by bosses is minimal. It can be a life of the mind if one is really interested in one’s work.

In our traditional practice, job security (called “confirmation”) comes almost automatically after a certain prescribed period of service (usually three years), provided there are no adverse performance evaluations. Fixed annual salary increases within a grade are also automatic. Promotion to higher ranks involves an element of competition inasmuch as two or more persons, some even from outside, may be candidates for the position to be filled.

One may argue that performance evaluation in both teaching and research should count in a fluid, rather than rigidly fixed, system of salary increases and promotion. In other words, the number of posts in a given rank (full professor, associate professor) should not be fixed. A person should be promoted to a higher rank because he/she has reached a certain level of accomplishment, and not only if a post in that rank has become vacant.

A teacher’s salary may not increase at all, or may go up by a substantial amount, from one year to the next, depending upon his/her performance during the year in review. How much should excellence in teaching weigh as compared to good research and publications? Before independence even the most celebrated college teachers were not known to have published much of research-based work. That has continued to be the case, and it will probably remain the same for the foreseeable future. I do not know how college teachers in Britain and Europe fare in this regard, but the four-year state colleges in America do not expect much by way of publications on the part of their faculty. Their emphasis remains focused on good teaching.

Research and publications are more appropriately expected at universities that offer the Ph.D. and MA degrees. At this level the teaching load is not high, and the professors do have time for research and scholarly writing. Many of them do not actually produce publishable work, and that is a pity. The basic reason for this shortcoming is the absence of proper incentives: publications do not bring commensurate professional advancement.

But even in the universities, at the post-graduate level, we should keep our emphasis on research and publications within bounds of reason and not let it overshadow the professors’ obligation to provide good teaching. We should avoid the “publish-or-perish” syndrome, partly because in our environment, like so many other endeavours, the enterprise will become farcical. Here, too, we should remain mindful of the ground realities.

In the English-speaking countries alone, hundreds of books are published every day. If 75 per cent of the ones in my field (political science) had never been written, mankind would not have been any the poorer. There is no need for our professors to traverse the ground that has already been covered. I can’t say much about esoteric subjects like physics and math, but it would be appropriate for Pakistani social scientists to investigate and discuss issues and problems relating to their own country. For instance, if a student of politics wants to explore legislative oversight of the executive, he should study the “question hour” in our National Assembly, about which little is known, and not the same hour in the House of Commons, about which a great deal has already been published.

But who will publish a book on that subject? A few of the reputable publishing houses in Britain and the United States may occasionally take on such a manuscript, but the vast majority of them will not. The number of professional journals with an interest in Pakistan is also extremely limited.

We must develop our own domestic outlets for the research output of our scholars. Commercial publishers in Pakistan are most reluctant to invest money in the publication of serious, non-fiction material, other than text-books. Journals in the various arts and sciences do exist, but their professional status is suspect because most of them do not require evaluation of submissions by recognized specialists in the relevant field before acceptance for publication.

Even in Britain and America commercial publishing houses will not touch manuscripts that are judged to be of interest only to a small segment of the academic community. University presses, which are non-profit publishing houses and whose operations are often subsidized, accept such works. We too should refurbish our university presses and commission them to publish scholarly manuscripts after determining that they are worthy of publication. Similarly, serious efforts should be made to upgrade our professional journals.

Professor Anwar Syed is currently away from the United States. He will resume his writing upon returning home in early February.

A rock and a hard place

THE people of Pakistan find themselves between a rock and a hard place. If the Jamali government wins a vote of confidence on Monday it would be a triumph of party betrayal; if it doesn’t, the emerging conglomerate and the leader it throws up might be worse.

Whatever the outcome, the people know well that the on-going struggle is not for democracy but for power, not for their rights or welfare but for self-aggrandizement. Such has been their lot over the past half a century or, more precisely, since the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan. the choice for them has remained between the rock of the military and hard place of politics, neither being democratic.

It is yet not 90 days but the little enthusiasm the October general election had generated has ebbed away. It now remains confined to the holders of office, to those who are still seeking it and to the hoodlums at their back. The people at large, including the 35 per cent adults who bothered to vote, are either indifferent or fast sinking into cynicism.

The mixed lot of the old and new parliamentarians thrown up by the electoral and accountability procedures devised by General Musharraf looks no better than those he had sent packing three years ago, if at all they are more quarrelsome and power hungry.

Yet the best hope of the country seems to lie in the present month-old government lasting for a while though claiming it to last for full five years, as both Musharraf and Jamali do, would be wholly premature and partial. This hope arises from the new prime minister and his men not being extremists or jingoistic whatever other doubts may be entertained about their intentions, calibre or popular support. Secondly, the police under this government would not be chasing the cinema bill boards while children are massacred in churches, as is happening in the MMA-ruled NWFP.

More important than the above two is the cooperation between the civil administration and military command which is expected to be much closer under the present coalition than the one that may be waiting in the wings. It is not the personal rapport between Musharraf and Jamali alone that matters. A fact of life which the politicians may not like but cannot ignore is that the important role the military has come to acquire in our internal security and external relations, especially with immediate neighbours (India, Afghanistan and Iran) and the sole superpower, cannot be taken away from it in the foreseeable future.

The civilian government would be able to regain its supremacy only when a variety of crises within the country and on its borders subside, and after the political leadership and civil institutions have established their authority and credence which, admittedly, has never been so low as it is now. In the current circumstances, if directly challenged or coerced, the armed forces are more likely to resume full control rather than go back into the barracks. The political gambits are already paving a way to it.

Critical to both national safety and development is how we conduct our relations with the three neighbours now that the clouds of suspicion, hate and fear engulfing the region are dissipating a bit. The easing of relations with Afghanistan’s Karzai government might become tense once again if a government sympathetic to the Taliban were to come to power in Islamabad which it would be if the Jamali government were to fall.

Pakistan’s soured relations with Iran, its first and once the best friend, are on the mend again. This renewed friendship in the present situation can go much beyond the religious sentiment and border trade. India is a good friend of Iran and depends on it for its energy needs. The Iranian president has shown willingness to help India and Pakistan normalize relations. His intervention might one day lead to a settlement of the Kashmir dispute where the UN resolutions, three wars and a long, agonizing insurgency have failed.

To reinforce the Iranian goodwill and effort in this direction, Pakistan should do all it can, and without delay, to facilitate the passage of the proposed gas pipeline from Iran to India through its territory. In fact, Pakistan should participate in the venture to make the pipeline bigger and bid for a share in the gas supply. Pakistan stands to lose nothing but earn transit fees and, in addition, get a clean fuel to replace a part of the dirty furnace oil it imports costing a billion dollars a year.

The gas pipeline, President Khatami has rightly said, would open the door to economic cooperation in the region where ECO and Saarc have failed. From Pakistan’s viewpoint it might also open the door to a Kashmir settlement, end the communal mayhem for 140 million Indian Muslims and improve the security and economic environment in Pakistan itself. All economic indices and studies show that to move from economic stability to growth, the country needs investment which would not take place unless we shed militancy and embrace moderation.

The constitutional and administrative changes Musharraf made are either disputed or are stillborn or are having an effect contrary to what was intended. Quickly recounted, the constitutional status of the Legal Framework Order will remain a cantankerous issue whether it goes to the courts or to the parliament.

Musharraf having seen its failing aspects in practical politics should be now amenable to a conciliatory solution. For that a helpful environment can be created only by the present government. By threatening to confront a military president on the streets or in courts of law, as the opposition is doing, the people, the judiciary and the economy all will come to harm.

In administrative reforms, the district governments have not been able to find their bearings as too much has been thrust on them without money, training and experience. The police are placed under the nazims, but are not answerable to them. The police themselves were promised fixed and secure tenures insulated from politics, yet the first Karachi city police chief was changed within a year.

National and provincial assembly members are now poised to take over the development functions of the councils as well. The funds are being doled out to bribe them and not to help the people. An immediate review of the new administrative arrangement conceived in haste and prejudice looks inevitable but could take place, like the LFO, only in a conciliatory atmosphere.

President Musharraf has himself knocked out the moral foundation from under his own reforms by surrendering his power to appoint the governors to political bosses. What he has conceded in Sindh cannot be withheld in the other provinces. The new governor of Sindh being the nominee of a political leader in exile would tend to create a rival centre of power in the province which would not be under the control of any authority within the country.

If there was one reform the president should have stuck his neck out for this was it. The governor of a province has a constitutional role above party politics and executive authority which vests in the cabinet. In view of the circumstances of his appointment, the new incumbent of the office in Sindh is unlikely to reconcile to this fact. The consequences for a province with a history of ethnic strife can be disastrous.

INS detentions are a bust

In the aftermath of 9/11, the national consensus was that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had to have better control over who was in the country legally or illegally. However, it was important that regaining control of immigration not trample on human rights, especially of those already caught in the INS paperwork limbo as they became permanent legal residents.

For people who voluntarily showed up to register at INS offices in Southern California last week, the system seems to have buckled. Reports in The Times and other media say that hundreds of men, from teens on up, were handcuffed, shackled and, according to their lawyers, even hosed down in jail. INS spokesperson Francisco Arcaute denies that the detainees were hosed down but admits that “following standard procedures, those who were transported from one location to another may have been belly-handcuffed.”

Most important for national security, after an experience like this, can the INS expect that people will show up for the next registration?

This unfortunate episode began last month when Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft issued an order requiring males 16 or older from 18 Mideast, North African and other Muslim countries and who are not permanent U.S. residents to go to an INS office. There, he said, they would be registered, photographed, fingerprinted and interviewed. Those who did not comply would face criminal charges or deportation, or both.

Then, immigrants with expired visas or who didn’t bring adequate documentation of their immigration status were detained. The INS, saying they were in violation of immigration laws, refuses to say how many or who they are. All such information should be made public. As of Thursday, most detainees were being released after clearing a background check.—Los Angeles Times

Political forecast for 2003: NOTES FROM DELHI

STAND on the edge of every decade and go berserk. Make the wildest predictions you can imagine, and check them out with facts as they unfold through the years. How many of us, of those who claim to be sane, would have predicted on the last day of 1989 that within two years the Soviet Union would be heaving mass of rubble, surviving as the original Mother Russia but deprived now of the many sons she had forced into her nest by war and chicanery over the previous two hundred years.

Who could have foreseen the international retreat and economic collapse of the United States in the seventies, the birth of Bangladesh, the rise of oil power, or the collapse of the Shah of Iran? In India, who could have predicted the assault on the Golden Temple and the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi in the eighties and indeed the eventual collapse of the Congress as a national political force?

The nineties were as dramatic, starting with the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the conversion of Kashmir into a deathly cauldron, and ending with the war over Kargil and the decimation of the Congress. Do you still want to predict what India and the world will look like in 2010? For that matter who would have had the gall to suggest, this time last year, a Narendra Modi sweep in Gujarat? But a hinge event occurs, and events twist like a tornado; in the subsequent havoc the world is so rearranged that prime ministers in waiting are wondering how to fend off exile. Who said the future was easy... I am sure you see the point of this preamble. I am merely protecting myself in case I get all my predictions wrong, as I am of course I predict I will do.

Assembly elections: The Congress will win in Himachal Pradesh, for the usual reason: because it does not expect to. It does not have to do anything to win this state, apart from hang around. Anti-incumbency is so strong in these hills that the voter will replace the BJP with the nearest alternative. The BJP’s attempts to create a pseudo-Gujarat will fail in Himachal, and all talk of “Himachali pride” raises little more than a snigger. This will not be a vote for Sonia Gandhi, although her closed-circuit intelligentsia will try to present it as the “answer” to the drubbing in Gujarat.

This will be a vote for a new chief minister who comes from Himachal rather than Italy. Proof that Sonia Gandhi cannot change the prevailing mood, either way, will come from Rajasthan, where the BJP will win easily and Vasundhara Scindia will take over as chief minister. And despite his charms, Digvijay Singh could find it difficult to win a third term in Madhya Pradesh, completing the Congress retreat from the Hindi heartland.

Maharashtra: More dismal news for the Congress. Since there is no assembly election scheduled in this state, the Congress can not lose one. But it could lose the government, because of the increasing disenchantment of Sharad Pawar with the Congress. Sonia Gandhi will not bend from the arrogant stance she has taken towards Congressmen who are seen to be wary of permanent family rule, because her personal future means more to her than the future of the party.

Those who could have been allies of the Congress will find this one attitude unacceptable, just as Sonia Gandhi will find anything other than this unacceptable. Growing distance will lead to drift, which will become a rift. Government will crumble under the weight of contradictions, particularly as Sharad Pawar begins to chart an independent route to the 2004 general elections.

Gujarat: Narendra Modi is likely to get so much stability he would not know what to do with it. He is a political player, not an administrator. Running a government will bore him. Fresh pastures will drum up his adrenalin. Sonia Gandhi, by making him a superhero, has also put him onto a different trajectory. He will not waste his year by worrying over a mere Gujarat.

He will make a bid to become president of the BJP after Venkaiah Naidu, and lead his party in the general elections in 2004. The major resistance to him will come not from the elderly triumvirate of Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi but the younger crowd: Pramod Mahajan, Sushma Swaraj and company, who, naturally, will be the first victims of Modi’s ambitions.

Atal Behari Vajpayee: There will be no challenge to the benign supremacy of Atal Behari Vajpayee, the fluctuating authority of Lal Krishna Advani or the status of all the status-quoists who constitute the cabinet. Token changes will be recorded on page one of newspapers: as for instance the induction of Farooq Abdullah into the cabinet, possibly as minister without portfolio so that he can get his perks without actually having to do a job.

The politics of sludge, fudge and drudge will continue, as the tried and tested formula for survival in a coalition. Periodically the prime minister attempts to use his moral authority to stress government energies in the direction of a vision (infrastructure, peace in South Asia or disinvestments) but since no one will entertain any idea that entails electoral risk, nothing much will happen. Politically, the PM will give his personal attention to Jammu and Kashmir, attempting to find solutions through the elected state government.

Pakistan will respond by intensifying its sporadic jihad. Expect a crisis in summer that will once again be neutralized, not by the armed forces, but by telephone calls. (Thank God for instant international dialling.) The prime minister will have a perfectly contented 2003 and holiday in Andamans in the last week of December 2003.

Sonia Gandhi: What happens when an irresistible demand for common sense encounters an immovable object at the head of the Congress? The immovable object wins. Sonia Gandhi will remain the president of the Congress and claimant to prime ministership. Not even a miserable performance in the assembly elections will persuade her to see where the good of her party lies. She will lead the Congress to its worst ever performance in the general elections of 2004 (probably in the spring), after which she will tearfully admit that she has to take responsibility and then suggest that the party makes her daughter its president.

Congress Leadership: What’s that?

Left: Will preserve what’s Left.

Arun Shourie: With any serious policy initiative placed on hold as the last phase of this government’s term begins, he will increasingly turn to his first love, and spend even more time as surrogate editor of a friendly newspaper.

George Bush: Will match his father in the speed of decline just as he emulated his dad in his crisis-driven rise in popularity. Has told everyone that he will go to war against Saddam Hussein in February, and is now contemplating whether Saddam will be killed within two days of this war by advancing American troops or missiles, or whether it will take longer. Will have no idea what to do in victory; and even less about what to do in a stalemate. Under pressure will manufacture Bushisms at pre-election rate.

Democrats will quietly turn to the Clintons to give them a candidate for 2004. The Clintons might make a unsurprising offer for the Democratic nomination.

Saddam Hussein: This time he will not make a speech promising the mother of all battles. This time, while there will be sympathy for his plight in the Muslim world, the Muslim street will not erupt in his favour. Just before the promised American invasion of Iraq, a group of Saddam sympathizers (probably led by Russia) will persuade him to leave Baghdad and go into exile where his life will be protected. He may be tempted, although he will be reluctant to accept the validity of any such guarantee. After all, which country is safe from the long reach of an American-backed war crimes tribunal?

World Cup: This will essentially be a bilateral between Australia and South Africa, the latter making up for deficiencies in batting with home support and knowledge of local conditions. The other alleged claimants are single-word dismissals. West Indies: non-starter. Sri Lanka: non-sequitur.

New Zealand: just non. Pakistan: brittle. England requires two words, though: utterly hopeless.

India joins Canada, Kenya, Zimbabwe, etc, as one of the countries which can no longer be considered among the serious claimants for next year’s World Cup.

The team has now been reduced to three fully functioning players (Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Zahir Khan), and another couple who look good in comparison to the rest. The others are injured. Most of the injuries are to the head, so recovery is unlikely. The captain, Saurav Ganguly, for instance, is suffering from a bloated head, and there is no medical assistance that can remedy that. He also has a severe case of immaturity and mental cramps, both inflamed by large amounts of advertising cash.

If Indian players took their cricket as seriously as they take their advertising plugs, we would be better placed than Australia. Our national eleven destroyed Indian cricket in stages. It first converted Test match innings into one-dayers, barely surviving fifty overs in an innings. Now it has turned one-dayers into half-dayers, barely getting through 25 overs before being bowled out by New Zealand. Australia’s main enemy will be complacence, or a maverick performance by another team in an elimination round. In regular sustained play, there is no team that comes close to Australia.

The writer is chief editor, Asian Age, based in New Delhi.