KARACHI, June 17: Over 1,000 regular, 13 PhD and MPhil degrees were conferred on graduates of seven disciplines at the 6th convocation of Hamdard University (HU) on Monday.

The chancellor of the university, chief justice (retd) Ajmal Mian, conferred the degrees and gave away gold medals to the graduates of doctorate, master, bachelor’s and postgraduate diploma programmes. About 355 degrees were awarded in person, while 664 candidates, including 117 that of HU Islamabad campus, were conferred in absentia.

Despite a sultry summer morning, graduates and their parents showed all zeal for the convocation, which was delayed for at least four months, and made it a cheerful event at Madinatul Hikmah. The university this time departed from its usual practice of holding the grand academic ceremony with a VVIP as the chief guest.

Besides the chancellor, renowned nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan awarded gold medals to the graduates on the occasion. President of the Hamdard Foundation, Sadia Rashid, who is abroad at present, was represented by her daughter Dr Mahum Munir Ahmed, a trustee of the foundation.

Justice Ajmal Mian said Hamdard University was essentially an institutional reflection of the personality of Hakim Mohammad Said, who loved Pakistan immensely and wanted to see the country develop and progress and gain worthy position among the nations of the world. He said that the main cause of the national malaise and retardation, as Hakim Said had diagnosed, was the alarming neglect and lack of education in the country.

While discussing the tangible and intangible dimensions of the quality of education, he said that tangible dimension of quality kept its focus on the values, knowledge and skills — both practical and social — which could enhance the value of a person in terms of earning or his acceptability in the job market.

The intangible dimension of quality, according to him, related to relatively stable elements in a society and culture. “The intangible aspect ingrains a person with a sense of purpose and brings a balance in his life. The anomaly in education today is that the emphasis is increasing on the tangible dimension and is gaining impetus at the expense of the intangible benefits,” he observed.

He said at the HU efforts were directed towards producing manpower, which would be skilled and professional and would at the same time be imbued with a patriotic spirit.

He informed the audience that the university had set up the building of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences and Technology at a cost of Rs120 million, which included a Rs50 million grant from the federal government. The university is also approaching the government for receiving fibre optic connectivity to establish and accelerate its contact all over through the internet, he added.

He said Hamdard University was striving to produce, through work of its different faculties, an academic culture contributing to the development of the students, both academically and intellectually.

He reminded the outgoing graduates that in economic terminology they had been transformed into a human resource needed by the country for its progress and development and thus they were going to be an addition to the talent pool of the country and would enrich the economic and social life of Pakistan.

In his report, vice-chancellor Dr Ismail Saad said that educational approach of the university was strictly non- commercial and public-spirited.

“Our claim to be non-commercial is restricted to the sense that all that is received is spent on education and re-ploughed for educational purposes, for the expansion of infrastructure for the running and promotion of curricular programmes and for financial assistance to merited students,” he said, adding that a sum of Rs20 million was spent in the form of education assistance and fee concession every year.

Dr Saad said the Faculty of Legal Studies was the latest addition to the teaching faculties of the university. Referring to the faculty of medical and health sciences, he said that it had a students enrolment of over 700, out of which 504 were studying in MBBS and 200 students in BDS programmes.

Highlighting the achievements by the HU city campuses, the vice-chancellor said that these had progressed rapidly in the last year through the induction of different batches of MBA executive and evening programmes, postgraduate diploma in Business Administration and BS (honours) in Business Informatics.

He said the HU had taken a pioneer initiative in introducing IT as a regular programme of study in the country and had developed courses and instructional programmes. He said the HU IT institute had already submitted proposals to the federal government for setting up a virtual university and library.

Those who were conferred PhDs degrees are as follows:

Business Administration: Khalid Amin; Education: Ghulam Khaja, Sultan Jehan, Sherbanu, Sabih Ali Jafri, Munir Ahmed and Masroor Ahmed Khan; Social Science: Tahir Pervez, Sajida Parveen and Syeda Farhana Noreen.

MPhil: Zohra Begum and Javed Saleh (Education); Mohammad Ahmed, Ahmed Hussain and Syed Qamar Abbas Rizvi (Pharmacology).