09 January 2004	Friday	16 Ziqa'ad 1424

LAHORE, Jan 8: Despite reservations by a majority of faculty members, the Punjab University administration has sought comments from all senior academicians on the proposed restructuring of the faculties to "manage" the increased academic departments and workload.

After receiving comments from the faculty deans, heads of the departments, institutes and constituent colleges and university professors, the PU has planned to hold a restructuring committee meeting on Saturday (tomorrow) and a final meeting to be chaired by the vice-chancellor on Jan 12. The final approval will be given by syndicate at its meeting on Jan 17.

Besides expressing reservations about the proposed allocation of the departments to the faculties, the teachers generally believe that the exercise is being pursued more for the creation of additional seats of deans rather than academic betterment.

They rejected the administration's claim that the universities in the world did not have more than five departments in a faculty, also describing the PU's plan as unjustified.

"The process of restructuring is not bad, but it must be based on identified academic pursuits. The issue should also be synthesised after a thorough debate," they told Dawn on Friday.

Saying that the faculties once divided will never be able to reunite because of interests of different officials, they said most of the universities in Europe had a number of departments, besides a large number of faculty members. They added that some of the newly proposed faculties would not have more than one professor.

Instead of existing nine faculties, the PU recently proposed 14 faculties, including four mono-discipline faculties - law, pharmacy, engineering and technology, medicine and dentistry - to restructure 68 academic disciplines.

The proposed faculties are: earth and environmental sciences; life sciences; physical sciences; behavioural and social sciences; management and information sciences; commerce; arts, culture and modern languages; Islamic and Oriental studies; education; law; pharmacy; chemical technology; medicine; and mathematical, statistical and computer sciences.

Meanwhile, some of the teachers told this reporter that there was another debate on how to further increase the number of faculties by dividing Islamic and Oriental Learning faculty, behavioural and social sciences faculty into two separate faculties each. Similarly, the PU College of Information Technology officials demand bifurcation of mathematical, statistical and computer sciences faculty to create a separate IT faculty having information technology and computer science disciplines.

They said the whole IT faculty had no regular professor, while the faculty of commerce, comprising Hailey College of Commerce and Hailey College of Banking and Finance, had only one regular professor.

Similarly, they said, the officials concerned were struggling to change the location of certain disciplines from one faculty to another while watching their own interests. Citing an example, they said, the claim of environmental sciences discipline was being made by the respective guardians of new faculties of life sciences, physical sciences and earth sciences.

The PU administration, however, believes that the existing nine faculties have grown to an unmanageable size due to a great diversity of subjects in some faculties following creation of new departments, increased enrolment and self-supporting programmes. The university also has over 370 affiliated colleges to monitor their academic and examination matters.

The administration believes that the faculty deans, who are responsible for all academic activities of the departments in the faculty, will no more be able to look after all the new and old departments properly. It claims that some of the faculties have diverse nature of emerging disciplines that sometimes keep respective deans unfamiliar with the academic needs of those disciplines.

"The restructuring of faculties will allow room for respective deans to raise academic standards, besides maintaining equity in appointment of deans and developing professionalism," the administration says.

It has also recommended creation of five additional offices of deans to look after the matters of academics, research and development, administration, undergraduate studies and student affairs for overall better performance.