April 05, 2007	Thursday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 16, 1428

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LAHORE, April 4: Refusing to succumb to the Higher Education Commission’s pressure of going hard on its plagiarists, the Punjab University has instead chosen the course of taking the commission to the Council of Common Interest for its ‘arbitrary’ decision of freezing the varsity’s development grant.

The HEC had on Tuesday stopped the funding of the PU following its failure to take strict action against five faculty members of the Centre for Higher Energy Physics, including its chairman, for plagiarising the work of foreign authors.

HEC chairman Dr Ataur Rehman had reportedly described the act as ‘cheating’ and demanded that the PU administration should remove the plagiarists from service forthwith.

Taking exception to the HEC’s decision, PU registrar Prof Naeem Khan said the commission’s chairman had not identified any section of the law under which action could be initiated against the five plagiarists.

“We can’t dismiss them from service only on the wish of Mr Rehman,” he said, adding that the commission was not authorised to freeze the PU funding.

“The chairman is not giving us money from his pocket. It is a public money and the PU students have a lawful right to it.” He said the varsity would move the Council of Common Interest against the decision and not accept the “dictatorial attitude” of Prof Rehman.

The registrar alleged that the commission’s chairman had been giving preference to his institute in Islamabad and a varsity in Sindh to other institutions regarding funding and its discrimination against the PU could be gauged from the statistics that showed that not a single HEC committee had the PU’s representation.

Answering a question whether letting the plagiarists off the hook meant that the PU had endorsed it on the campus, Prof Khan claimed that the varsity had ‘zero tolerance’ against plagiarism — very much the slogan of the HEC — but it was unable to proceed against them as neither the varsity calendar nor the government legislation provided any penalty.

He said it had dismissed a senior research officer of the South Asian Studies on plagiarism charges, but a court had restored him owing to absence of any law.

When asked if the plagiarists would be tried under ‘misconduct’ of varsity’s act, the registrar said: “It is applied to moral offences alone.”

It is pertinent to mention that the PU had also terminated the contract of a lecturer of the Punjab College of Information and Technology and forced the assistant professor of the Solid State Physics Department to resign on the similar charges sometime ago, but in this particular case it has not grilled the plagiarists. It is alleged that the accused have close association with the vice-chancellor as well as the head of inquiry committee. Prof Khan, however, denied the allegations.

The PU syndicate had only stripped CHEP director Prof Dr Fazal-i-Aleem of directorship and issued warning to lecturers Maqsood Ahmad, Rasheed Ahmad, Sohail Afzal Tahir and Alam Saeed, besides withholding their two annual increments. Prof Aleem’s tenure as CHEP director had already ended in October last year, but he was asked to carry on till further orders. He will continue to serve as director-general of the School of Physical Sciences, PU.

According to the Copy Right Ordinance 1962 Section 66, “a plagiarist or a person who knowingly infringes or abets the infringement of copyright is liable to punishment up to three years or a fine of Rs100,000 or both provided the complaint is filed with police by the author of the work.” Last year the copyright ordinance had also come on the schedule of the Federal Investigation Agency.

John Ellis, adviser to the CERN director-general, had written to the PU VC that some members of the CHEP had plagiarised its copyrighted article. He said it was ready to cooperate with the varsity and reserved the right to ask CERN legal service to initiate necessary action. CERN is a European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

“Legal action against the CHEP plagiarists can only be initiated if CERN or other persons or organisations whose work has been copied by them come forward and get a case registered against them in Pakistan,” said a senior advocate.