Higher education: a retrograde step (Parts I & II)
by Humeira Iqtidar

posted December 15, 2002

The short-sighted policy framework proposed by the Higher Education Commission and implemented as part of the Model University Ordinance represents the most potent attack on Pakistan's educational institutions in the fifty-five year history of the country.

If allowed to prevail, it threatens to destroy the basic principles of accessibility, equity and progress on which our educational system is founded. Furthermore, it stands to rob institutions of higher education of their academic freedom and democratic values and expose them to the whims and fancies of a select elite.

The damage that this ordinance will inflict on our society will be permanent and catastrophic. It is imperative that the affected and the others who care act decisively to defeat this assault before these champions of reform are successful in taking Pakistan's educational institutions on the same road on which countries like Zambia have travelled with disastrous results.

For those who have not followed the developments so far, here is a brief overview. Apparently responding to the issue of lack of recognition of Pakistani degrees in western universities, and the quality of education imparted at all levels, the government has decided on a number of "reforms". The key one among these is the formulation of a board of governors in each institution that will have ultimate authority over hiring, firing, salaries and promotions of all staff, sale and management of all property and assets associated with the institutions and fixing of fees for students. There is no recourse to appeal and the current system of a 300 or so strong senate in the public universities will be dissolved.

One recommendation is to hire university and college lecturers on a contract basis rather than tenure to dispel complacency. Research and productivity will be rewarded according to a system which offers little reward is for publishing in Pakistani journals, some for publishing in European journals and the most reward for publishing in American journals.

The pay for all university and college teachers would supposedly be raised but at the same time it would be linked to performance, which will be evaluated using a range of criteria, including their research productivity. For this increased pay for teachers, fees would be increased but not more than 10 per cent a year.

The formulation of these reforms has been done according to the guidelines of a commission headed by Mr. Shams Lakha of the Aga Khan University (AKU) with representatives from other elitist universities in Pakistan, including the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Technology (GIKI), and the Institute of Business Administration (IBA). The government says it has adopted these reforms through a "consultative" process by including "educationists". Similar hierarchies and "reforms" are planned for the public health sector, or whatever is left of it.

It is not difficult to see the illegitimacy of the process through which the whole package of reforms has emerged. The Higher Education Commission is staffed primarily by representatives of private elitist universities, while those who have to bear the brunt of the proposed changes have been excluded from this "consultative" process from the outset. Faced with widespread protests by an alliance of university, college and school teachers, doctors and lawyers, the government has created new bodies to sidetrack their objections.

The commission is pressing ahead with myopic, ad hoc policies, which have no precedence anywhere in the world. For instance, a Health University has been created that now has jurisdiction over all the medical colleges of Punjab like King Edward. Recently it decreed that 30 per cent of the seats at Fatima Jinnah College would be filled on a self-finance basis, thus creating an exclusive corner for the rich.

Similarly, all education colleges and institutes have been placed under an Education University, whose degree is not recognized, and whose only function is to execute the policies dictated from above. While this will no doubt be publicized as decentralization, in effect it is little different from the British colonial rulers hiring local sepoys to 'manage' India efficiently.

It is claimed that the board of governers will make the system more efficient. They will certainly be an efficient instrument to enforce the draconian reforms while perpetuating the power of those behind them. That it will completely kill the 'effectiveness' or the raison d'etre of the education system is of course besides the point. Efficiency and profits are the holy grail of the new world order and the boards will probably do its job admirably well in the interest of the private sector.

Their efficiency will be guaranteed since they will not be responsible to anybody in the ultimate analysis and no guidelines have been provided for evaluating performance. All accountability has been dispensed with, no doubt to make the system more efficient from a particular point of view.

There has of course been no dearth of such initiatives in the past. But the fact that all attempts to create such bodies have only worsened the situation while burdening the taxpayer with the expenses of running the new body seems lost on the Higher Education Commission. We are given to understand that somehow the boards will not be authoritarian or allow political influence and mediocrity that have plagued our institutions over the years.

Old government schools, universities, colleges and hospitals occupy acres of prime property. The Punjab University, for instance, has approximately 2,800 acres of property. One can only shudder to think what will happen when the vast resources of our universities will be put at boards of governors' disposal. Indeed, one of the schools in Raja Bazaar in Rawalpindi, which was recently placed under this system has now been 'efficiently' replaced by shops that were allegedly sold for one crore rupees each. But then, why not turn all universities into commercial property?

Surely, this will not only take care of the fund-starved universities that are considered to be a drain on the national exchequer but also provide unprecedented funds, which can be used by the boards in the best interests of their patrons or for whatever else such resources have been used in our country's unfortunate history.

Fees in some of the Lahore colleges where some version of the governing boards has already been implemented now range from Rs. 32,000 to 40,000 per year, with the result that a student who topped her F.A. exams was unable to study at Kinnaird College (where fees currently stand at Rs. 38,000). Even the blind can see that this trend will and can only grow, depriving middle and lower middle class students of a decent education.

Since most of the boards are composed of members of private corporations (some of which call themselves educational institutions), the members are lavishly paid, with salaries of some as high as three lakh rupees a month. Instead of the state supporting students, the students will end up supporting the elitist boards and their favourites.

The fact is that with the government clearly not having any intention of increasing spending on education, further fee rises are inevitable in spite of current government reassurances to the contrary. Mr. Shams Lakha insists that parents must know the "true" cost of educating their children.

In an interview to a Karachi monthly magazine, he suggested "we must inform them that even if their tuition fee is say Rs. 2,000, the actual cost of education is around Rs. 80,000 and the state is paying as much as Rs. 78,000". How will parents know of these "true costs" if not by bearing them? The Model University ordinance has spelt out its activities in detail without saying it in so many words that what it aims at is wholesale privalization of education.

What is truly ironic is that the private universities themselves, upheld as models, would not to be what they are if it were not for government subsidies (access roads, electricity connections), international aid or simply the benevolence of their founders (the Aga Khan for the AKU). And LUMS, AKU, GIKI and IBA represent less than one per cent of the total privatized educational institutes in Pakistan. The rest have no facilities, no open spaces, no libraries worth talking about and almost no permanent staff and they produce lower quality graduates than the public institutions, but charge much higher fees.

That the quality of our public universities will go down as a result of these reforms is a foregone conclusion. Pakistan is not the first country to opt for privatization of education. In some other developing countries, privatization has already reduced access and to education and brought down quality.

Since being privatized, the English literature department at Government College, Lahore has laid off most senior staff to reduce costs. They now hire graduate girls, who are not paid more than about Rs. 5,000, a month, or retired professors who again are happy to work for a pittance. There is no commitment to research, and no quality control since teachers change from term to term.

Similarly, in hospitals junior doctors with little or no experience are in charge as higher grade and senior doctors have been forced to retire to reduce costs. The quality of both education and health are being jeopardized under the new system. How the Higher Education Commission has promised to pay higher salaries to doctors and teachers without making fees for students and patients prohibitive is beyond comprehension.

One can only imagine how competitive and inspiring one can expect one's fellow student to be given that 30-50 per cent of them will have 'won' their seats in an auction. And these 'self-finance'. The more they can "donate" above and beyond that, the better their chances of admission.

(To be concluded)

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Implications of wholesale privatization: Higher education: a retrograde step -II

By Humeira Iqtidar

The claim that the reforms will lead to higher research productivity is unconvincing. Good research is deeply intertwined with the context of the conditions it is carried out in. In order to be valuable, research should ideally examine problems that are important to the researcher's surroundings.

The Higher Education Commission's equating good research with publications in journals of international repute is rather strange. American journals are concerned with theoretical and empirical problems that are relevant to American society or America's interest in the world.

Try publishing an article on the negative effect of IMF conditionalities on the local economy in the Journal of Finance. International journals have evolved over time, as have the problems that they like to examine. This process of evolution is critical to the healthy development of a society.

Doing research so that it can be published in American journals will only alienate our educational institutions from society in which they reside. Institutions of higher learning are created to provide intellectual leadership to their countries. They are in turn sustained by the reality of their environment.

Institutions like MIT have evolved in a recursive relationship with their environment. Route 128 in Massachusetts, as well as several leading technological giants such as Kodak or Ford owe much to what is carried out at MIT. These corporations, in turn, have consistently confronted the university with novel problems that they are unable to solve and funded it generously to help solve them. Similarly, the highly respected Indian Institute of Technology has evolved in sync with the Tatas and the Birlas.

MIT has also enjoyed this type of relationship with the government of the United States. Technological research is prompted by the problems that arise in the economy and other fields. In order to be made useful, research must be linked with the local economy, not driven by foreign journals.

The main reason why our engineering universities do not produce much research is lack of opportunities for application of the results within the country. Research is fuelled by novel problems, which is why we see greater research in vibrant economies, while a stagnant economy has little interest in research and innovation. As for journals, if anything, local ones need to be encouraged to carry more of research related articles. In any case, by abolishing tenure or service in universities, in favour of contract service, the Higher Education Commission has effectively eliminated all possibilities of there being any useful research.

Research is a long-term business. It is not carried out by contract employees anywhere in the world. Tenure is not only a guarantee of continuity and academic freedom, but also serves to reduce the risk associated with exploratory work, routinely undertaken by academics. The commission better recognize that universities are not corporations. Their missions are fundamentally different, as are their strategies for managing personnel and their affairs generally.

In the final analysis, it would be naive to consider the commission as the sole progenitor of reforms. As a writer pointed out in a recent article in Dawn (November 17), these are a logical extension of the larger privatisation agenda that is operative in the country at the instance of the IMF and the World Bank. As evidence, there were not only meetings between the Higher Education Commission and World Bank officials, but also the imprint of the World Bank/IMF doctrine under which all "subsidies" to health and education are being dutifully withdrawn.

Subsidies to health and education are not just that: they are an aid to development and progress in a poor country. Previous privatisation escapades of the Bank and the Fund are illustrative in this regard. As the researcher Mark Lynas has shown, the World Bank's "reforms" of the health sector in Zambia are directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Zambian people.

While it all started in the name of efficiency, most people cannot afford to buy the medicines they need, dying of easily treatable diseases. Partly as a result, infant mortality in Zambia has risen by 25 per cent since 1980, while life expectancy has fallen from 54 to 40. The government of Zambia has similarly been forced to slash its spending on education, with the result that enrolment has fallen from 96 per cent in the mid-1980s to 77 per cent today.

A predictable outcome of the policies of the World Bank, which claims to be the champion of female education, is that since schooling throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa is now available only to those who can pay, the girls are virtually excluded. That this outcome is entirely likely also in Pakistan is shown by the fact that in Karachi University female students tend to be from higher income families than the males. This inevitably leads to the conclusion that women's education only becomes an option when the family has enough disposable income. If the parents are pushed to chose between their male and female children in the face of rising costs of education, they will choose to invest on their sons.

We in Pakistan are well on our way to that fate. As it is, the government currently supports only about 30 per cent of the education sector and roughly the same of the health sector; the rest has already been privatized. This 30 per cent of the overall health and education facilities has to support around 60 per cent of our population that lives on or below the poverty line and another 20-30 per cent that is marginally above it. There are already privatized schools, colleges, universities, and hospitals that provide services to the upper middle class onwards. Nearly 70 per cent of our health and education facilities already cater to the less than 10 per cent of Pakistan's population that constitutes the upper middle class and beyond. Privatizing the remaining facilities will mean nothing to these upper classes but it will mean further privations and suffering for those below.

It is in recognition of the consequence of the wholesale privatization of health and education and of the imposition of corporate rule leading to further sharp divisions in society, that agitation by the teachers, doctors and lawyers in Pakistan has taken on the dimensions of a political movement. It may well become part of the growing tide of anti-globalization movement across the world. People, especially the young, are becoming increasingly involved in the larger issues concerning the world.

The continued strength of the anti-globalization movement bears testimony to that. An important reason for this renewed engagement is a growing threat to the basic rights of citizens in civilized society such as in reference to health and education.

The fact is that the problems highlighted by the Shams Lakha steering committee on higher education which forms the basis for all these reforms in question, are not related to public vs. private spending on education but to the suffocating hierarchy that is present in all our institutions. The Model University Ordinance further consolidates this hold by concentrating all power at the top, in addition to privatizing education. The key to useful change is to not hand over government responsibility to boards of governors but to divert more resources to health and education.

There is no doubt that there are numerous problems in the public education system as it exists now. However, the fact that the institutions within the system are able to deliver any quality at all in spite niggardly funding, is a testament to the dedication of many within these institutions. After all, these institutions were able to deliver quality education only a couple of generations ago back under public funding, and why can't they do so now? Universities and hospitals in societies with minimal social and economic divisions - Sweden for one - continue to be publicly funded. In European countries where some hospital functions or university departments were privatized, there are strong movements underway to reverse the changes because their adverse results are now evident to the people.

from: http://www.dawn.com/2002/12/05/op.htm#1

http://www.dawn.com/2002/12/06/op.htm#2