KARACHI, March 19: The consequences of the ill-conceived policies of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) will be disastrous and further ruin the standard of education.

This was said in the lecture delivered at Pakistan Medical Association House yesterday by Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, Head of Department of Physics, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, on Higher Education in Pakistan: Problems and Possible Solution. The programme was held in memory of late Dr Safdar Zaidi, one of the many doctors murdered in 2002.

Dr Hoodbhoy said that higher education in Pakistan was facing a long-standing crisis which had been aggravated by the ill-conceived policies of the commission. “The commission has allowed the mushroom growth of public and private sector universities without realising their potential. Its policies have done little to uplift the standard of education, rather encouraged plagiarism and corruption in institutions,” he said.

“The $4.2 billion plan of establishing Pak-European universities is unrealistic. To be built solely by Pakistani government, the plan envisages that universities would be headed by a foreign vice chancellor and have 30pc foreign faculty paid in Euros and that too 40pc more to what they earn in their countries,” he said.

Plagiarism, he said, was rife in all institutions of higher learning after the commission announced an award of Rs60,000 per research paper printed in a foreign journal. A 30pc increase in ‘research’ papers had been noted, he said. Giving an example how teachers were playing their ‘part’ to end ‘PhD deficit’ in the country, he said, a biology teacher at the Quaid-i-Azam University was acting as a supervisor to 38 PhD students. At the same university, an obsolete accelerator was bought for Rs400m at the request of the centre of physics.

The budget of HEC, he said, had increased from Rs3billion in 2002 to Rs22billion, but, all this money would go waste due to the poor policies of the commission. “Entrance test to universities be introduced, student unions be restored, teachers training institutes be set up and an environment created to encourage intellectual and ideological discourse,” he said.

Earlier, Dr Aamir Omair, Dr Samrina Hashmi and Dr Tipu Sultan paid glowing tributes to late Dr Safdar Zaidi. From the end of 2001 to 2002, more than 70 doctors were murdered. Dr Zaidi was shot in DHA after dropping off his kids at a school. In the end, a candle was lit in his and in the memory of many other professionals who were murdered and are still missed by their friends and the nation.—A Reporter