LAHORE, Feb 22: Punjab Governor Khalid Maqbool has compulsorily retired the former director and four faculty members of the Centre for High Energy Physics, Punjab University, after a probe body found them guilty in the plagiarism case.
“The director and the four faculty members of CHEP have knowingly indulged in plagiarism”, the two-member inquiry Committee stated in its report to the governor.
The governor had initially constituted a three-member committee headed by Punjab Board of Revenue senior member Safdar Javed Syed which submitted that the case of deciding penalty should be referred back to the PU Syndicate or the governor should constitute another inquiry body headed by a BPS-22 officer.
Sources said the submission did not please the governor as the inquiry committee had just been tasked to rule on the alleged plagiarism. The governor then asked committee’s two members — University of Health Sciences vice-chancellor Prof Dr Malik Husain Mubbashar and PU School of Biological Sciences director Prof Dr Abdul Rauf Shakoori - to give a clear-cut assessment on the case (plagiarism) in question.
The wrongdoing by CHEP’s five faculty members surfaced in 2006 when the then PU faculty of science dean Prof Dr Mujahid Kamran, now PU vice-chancellor, filed a complaint that the CHEP faculty members had plagiarized international research papers.
When two different PU probe bodies confirmed the charges, the university syndicate decided in April last year that CHEP director Prof Dr Fazal-i-Aleem should relinquish the directorship of the centre while two annual increments each of assistant professor Maqsood Ahmad and lecturers Rasheed Ahmad, Sohail Afzal Tahir and M. Alam Saeed be withheld. The syndicate had also censured the accused teachers. Syndicate’s `mild punishment’ had drawn strong reaction from within the university and Higher Education Commission (HEC).
Stating that the punishments were not according to the gravity of the offence, the HEC kept pressing the Punjab University administration (led by VC Arshad Mahmood then) to fire the accused faculty members.
When the PU did not heed the advice, the HEC withheld varsity’s Rs139 million grant and, after sometime, sought governor/chancellor’s intervention for an appropriate decision. Consequently, the governor sought a detailed presentation from the university in May last year.
