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'HEC's policies to spell disaster'
KARACHI, March 20(Dawn): 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.
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