IT is disturbing that the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission cannot find a single suitable person for the position of chief economist. It is even more disturbing that the Higher Education Commission still does not have a chairperson. Perhaps a different search committee could have done it differently. Perhaps, too, the HEC needs a chairperson who is not from public universities, and does not project himself alone.

One expected the maturation of our educational system to a level where scholars from other countries would eagerly seek admission in our universities. Our seats of learning should have attained the state where they commanded respect for their scholarship equally in the humanities, sciences and engineering.

A university is a seat of learning and inquiry, with the highest standards of integrity and innovation, and of contribution to the pool of human knowledge, based on the concept of a self-governing community of scholars. Irreverence is, and must be, its basic pillar. Students need to develop the attributes of classical education (using knowledge in the social context), as well as the spirit of inquiry and reasoning.

This must be supplemented with a sympathetic awareness of their own cultural and historical traditions as well as that of others, and of course the ability to organise and communicate their thoughts and arguments.

Regrettably, this has not happened. The HEC remains fixated on investing in infrastructure, or mere numbers (enrolments, research publications and their ‘marking’ system). Many publications are plagued by plagiarism. A ‘leading’ mathematics professor publishes a paper a week! Vice-chancellors are accused of plagiarism, sexual harassment, and poor diligence in issuing fake degrees.

Pakistan’s universities have generally failed to create graduates who can engage in fulfilling careers as teachers, researchers or entrepreneurs. The HEC is in real danger of becoming the bloated University Grants Commission which it replaced.

The HEC needs to be reformed and reinvigorated. This cannot happen with a commission which has political appointees as its members. It cannot be done equitably if Azad Jammu & Kashmir, or Gilgit Baltistan, are not represented. It is not enough to churn out PhDs or publications, or establish Offices of Research Innovation and Commercialisation if the approach is bureaucratic and parochial.

Higher education is in financial distress globally. In Pakistan, public universities depend excessively on state funds, and also resort to ‘self-financing’ resulting in serious distortions. Universities have received Rs240 billion since 2007, and expect large annual increases without serious review. The HEC’s Medium-Term Development Frameworks 2005-15 projected expenditures of Rs1,150bn, with a throw-forward of Rs600bn. This is unsustainable in an economy under stress and a tax-to-GDP ratio of 10pc. Private universities are more efficient.

Oxford University is the UK’s biggest landlord, and needs no state support. We need to recall the traditional concept of waqf for our major mosques and madressahs, and endow each university with land in order to generate critical revenues, supplemented with endowments from alumni and businessmen. The provinces have yet to foot a fair portion of the costs.

Internal and external efficiencies in public universities, and within the HEC, must be improved in order to enhance the decision-making framework. First, reduce costs and enforce a moratorium on new development projects for five years. Why did the HEC allocate Rs227m for three separate departments of biotechnology/biology at the Punjab University in 2013, and what are the outcomes of billions spent on the Third World Centre for Science & Technology at Karachi or so-called centres of excellence? The universities should fund a tenure-track system themselves with stricter promotion criteria, while the process which pays faculty for publication and research supervision is misused and should be closed. There are too many dubious publications in local/online journals.

Internal efficiencies will improve with higher student-teacher ratios, reducing non-academic/academic staff from 2:1 to 1:3, combined with better balance between the workloads and functions actually performed by professors versus their compensation. US states insist on minimum faculty loads. This will have a salutary effect upon the ‘teach-hop-teach’ syndrome exploited by roaming visiting faculty.

Research will improve in the engineering, medical and social sciences on one campus and will ‘civilise’ engineers and scientists, while allowing social sciences to better participate in the evolving relationship between science and society. Currently, universities have little say in public policies as the social sciences are badly neglected.

External efficiencies are poor. Decent employment among graduates is problematic and the ‘business school’ bubble has burst; economic relevance is missing, except in the IT sector. Imagine research in regional history without proficiency in Persian/Arabic. Result: only secondary sources are consulted.

Industry/academia linkages are missing, with hardly any products or processes emerging from engineering universities. The Foreign Faculty Hiring Programme needs a major rethink; universities welcome even mediocre persons, so long as the HEC pays.

There are genuine concerns regarding substandard degrees after the devolution of higher education to provinces, but the HEC too has erred in confusing autonomy with independence. While strong provincial HECs as components of the federal HEC are necessary, we must focus on colleges to resolve the continuing mismatch between two- and four-year programmes.

Finally, the process of research funding needs to be implemented by an organisation different from the HEC. A strengthened Pakistan Science Foundation can bring the private sector into the loop leading to better academia-industry linkage.

The writer is the vice-chancellor of the CASE Institute of Technology, Islamabad, and a former member of the President’s Committee which recommended the establishment of the HEC.