Why the great hurry?: Model University ordinance enactment
by Omar R. Quraishi

posted December 15, 2002

The government's decision to finally promulgate the controversial Model University ordinance is baffling for especially since every day for the past few weeks there have been countrywide protests against its draft proposals. The first thing that comes to mind that what was the great hurry in enacting this law on November 13 when parliament was about to convene anyway in a few days time.

The immediate response, as expected, has been a hardening of the position taken by the opponents to this law. Their immediate response was that students and participating faculty members were told by leaders of various teachers associations to get ready for a long-term protest against the government's decision.

The other important point that needs to be taken up with the decision to implement the ordinance is that it reflects a mindset on the part of policymakers that ignores the interests of all (pardon the jargon here) stakeholders involved especially the teachers and the students. This is not to say at all that those who teach in our public sector institutions are angels who do their job efficiently and diligently but rather that this reality should not deflect from the argument that the government's action is quite one-sided and unilateral.

In fact, the government and its education minister has repeatedly said in the press (including on this page) that the ordinance has been formulated keeping in mind the views and opinions of all the parties involved in education. They have also said that much of the criticism against the ordinance in unjustified because fees won't rise and education will not be privatized. However, one can easily respond to this by saying that had the government been more forthcoming about releasing the draft for public debate, prior to its enactment, perhaps their wouldn't be so many misunderstandings - as the ordinance's supporters insist there are.

In addition to that, from what one can gauge by following the debate in the media and based on the statements of both sides, the issue has to deal with making higher education 'market-based'. Now, this is simply a euphemism for saying that our universities and colleges should teach those course for which there is a lot of demand according to market dictates. So, the critics say, and rightly so that courses like humanities and the arts are bound to suffer if this happens since the market, as we all know, doesn't seem to place too much of a premium on literature, painting or becoming a writer.

The government then says that the manner in which the ordinance was drawn up was indeed consultative in that a committee was set up and it drew upon people from the education sector in important positions, and led by the president of Aga Khan University, Shams Kasim Lakha. To this, however, the teachers say that Mr Lakha and others on the committee who helped formulate the proposals are not in any way representative of the education sector in Pakistan. In fact, if memory serves one correctly, one of the meetings that the committee had was with Pakistani expatriates in Boston in America.

The opponents have also time and again accused the government of taking these reforms at the behest of the World Bank and the IMF. The reason, they say, is that these organizations want the government to reduce its subsidy on education. And going by the policy recommendations that international lending institutions have placed on Pakistan - asking it to gradually remove subsidies in the agriculture, power and gas sectors - it's quite likely that now they would be telling Islamabad to gradually phase out subsidies for higher education.

The government has then responded by saying that its reforms are not IMF or World Bank driven but rather an attempt to improve higher education standards. Now, it doesn't mean that either of these points are necessarily mutually exclusive, i.e. that the government might be using the World Bank's assistance in trying to improve educational standards.

Having said that, the critics of the government's approach seem to have a valid point. The very day that newspapers carried the report that the ordinance had been promulgated (the story was carried only by the state-run news wire, APP, and was a couple of paragraphs long), Dawn carried a report that the education minister had met two World Bank officials from its Technical Mission on Higher Education. The report said that the minister had detailed discussions with the Bank officials "about the changes and reforms required to be introduced in the higher education sector in Pakistan to improve educational standards and to make it internationally compatible and need-oriented".

It further said - and this seems quite a revelation: "It has been agreed between the HEC [Higher Education Commission, of which the education minister is the head] and the World Bank delegation that the report on higher education prepared by the Steering Committee headed by Dr Shams Kasim Lakha will be used as a baseline by the bank to get guidelines while preparing its recommendations." This, as they would say in America, is the 'smoking gun', or damning indictment if you will, because it necessarily implies that the Lakha report is to be used by the World Bank is making its recommendations to the Pakistan government on higher education reform. And the Lakha report is also apparently the basis of the Model University ordinance that the government promulgated in such undue haste. So, the government's position that it has not taken any directions from the World Bank in formulating and enacting this new law is indefensible.

Now, to the other side. Yes, there has always been a criticism against teaches and professors in our public sector universities. Much of it is justified and very valid because it comes from students themselves. Teachers don't teach well, they use notes sometimes half a century old, and in most cases they don't even bother showing up for class. In fact, several teachers actively involved in the protests at the University of Karachi have been accused by their students of not showing up for class.

The head of the Karachi University Teachers' Society, Sarwar Nasim, was also asked in an interview he gave to Dawn whether all the teaching staff was against the agreement, since not all of them seemed to take part in the protests. His reply was that some of the teachers did not take part because they were not used to taking part in protests as such and any conclusion that the teaching community was divided in its opposition to the ordinance was wrong.

However, this argument makes little sense for the simple reason that just like many students are more bothered about the damage being done to their academic year by the delays and the protests, many teachers too have other, more pressing worries (especially if they are doing a good job at teaching). In fact, the logical conclusion that one could draw - and this strikes at the heart of the argument of the protesters and is implicit in the government's standpoint - is that those who have the most to lose once the ordinance is implemented are in the forefront of the opposition. And why will they lose their jobs? Because they are inefficient and shouldn't be teaching in the first place. Hence, if the ordinance helps in purging our universities of these kinds of 'teachers' then all the better.

Taking all things into consideration, though, it would be safe to assume that the protests that we have been seeing happening every day in campus all across the country are not likely to die down, not at least in the foreseeable future. And that's why the government must take the blame because it simply does not make sense to enact a law in such a hurry in a matter as important - and in this case controversial too - as higher education reform.

Writer's email: omarq@cyber.net.pk

from: http://www.dawn.com/weekly/education/education.htm#3