Higher education has never remained focus of any governments in our 70 years history. Apart from some of the selected centres that come under the umbrella of Pakistan’s nuclear program, most of the institutions are marked as mediocrity with no motivation for real science and knowledge.  In year 2002, Pakistan’s higher education commission (HEC-reincarnation of the erstwhile university grant commission) was established. HEC is an autonomous apex body responsible for funding and evaluation of research activities along with degree accreditation powers. 

        During its early days HEC had changed the culture of scientific research through several innovative programs including capacity and infrastructure building of universities, faculty development programs and overseas scholarships. In the year 2008, Nature commended HEC’s efforts in its editorial calling it “silent revolution in higher education”. However, despite adequate fundings, reforms and policy changes critics argue that HEC is failing due to systematic flaws, merit violation, favouritism and political manipulations. Excessive centralisation, lack of external evaluation, rigorous accountability and no transparency have further diverted HEC in creating an open scientific culture based on quality and knowledge. 

       HEC claims success with establishment of over 150 new universities, 500% increase in number of publications and an improved international ranking of Pakistani universities. With rote-learning and below average research outcomes, most universities merely serving as feeding platform for international institutions. HEC funding are based on a scientist’s cumulative personal impact factor. This means that the scientist has to accumulate an impact in any way possible (publish 100 papers with impact factor 1 rather than couple of quality papers). This has nourished the culture of “paper mafia” where colleagues and friends, often from different research backgrounds share authorships in order to get funded and promoted. This also raises the question of what authorship entails. The US National Institutes of Health has given the guidelines on the activities that qualify: active mentoring, designing and doing experiments, and data acquisition and analysis plus drafting the manuscript. Collecting funds or distant supervision do not qualify to become an author. On the other hand, it is inherently difficult to publish in some research fields; for example in structural biology, while relatively easy in areas such as human molecular genetics, population genetics, and other studies involving large data sets. How can one fairly evaluate such different fields with the same yardstick? 

           Similarly, HEC sponsored foreign PhD fellowship programme for over 3,000 scholars to study abroad in world’s top universities. While the impact of overseas program was yet to be seen, HEC started a rather larger indigenous PhD program at local universities.  Local faculty members got strong financial incentive for these students and universities were inundated with PhD aspirants. Faculty members recruited dull students-compromising quantity over quality and the positions that were to be filled by the overseas scholars occupied by local PhDs with the help of their supervisors. Every second university across country lacking research diversity because MrX, MrY, and MrZ who all did PhD under Mr.A are now working in the same department, and even on a same research theme-a perfect combo for sharing authorships and incentives from HEC.

           A friend did PhD from Europe’s top institute and is now surviving in one of the Pakistani university as a associate professor. His Rs 10 million funding proposal was returned back by HEC with the objection that only Rs. 2 million can awarded, provided the project is modified accordingly. This clearly shows the lack of skills and expertise to carry out effective evaluation and decisions making. The chronic funding and lack of infrastructure is not the only problem but the attitude, scientific misconduct and the violation of research ethics are perhaps even more serious issues. For instance, The Hussain Ebrahim Jamal Research Institute of Chemistry (HEJ) has everything; funding, labs, infrastructure and people, yet they are not producing cutting-edge and international standard research. There is an explosion of papers published from the institute, however none reach any of the really good journals. No one apparently goes for excellence but rather stick to quantity which is what matters for HEC. Not to mention that this culture has flourished under the patron-in-chief and former head of HEC Professor Dr Atta-Ur-Rahman, and has been adopted by a lot of other institutes in Pakistan.

            Dr. Rehman is revered by many young scientists, including myself, for his scientific excellence and remarkable work for higher education in Pakistan. But I believe there are several areas where his policies failed miserably or his inactions resulted in scientific culture with minimal quality, diversity and directionality. Science globally has changed significantly and Pakistan needs a new team of game changer scientists who can take things to an international level. Instead of father figures, we need teams of dedicated people, likely overseas, who are paid to do a job and don’t get anything else but the pay; no recognitions, awards, pictures in newspapers and tv, buildings with their names etc. 

           PTI government announced that prime minister house in Islamabad will be converted to a new university. There are already 8-10 universities in twin cities, do we need yet another university? If the new university is to be build and run under same HEC models, it may turn out to be a failed political stunt and a total waste of resources and opulent space. However, this may be a unique opportunity for the current government to introduce new, bold and out of the box solutions and reforms to fix our higher education sector. Here, Pakistan should seek help from China in establishing international standard university, possibly under CPEC program. This university should only offer research programs (PhDs and post PhD) in selective fields; such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, space science, information technology, religious philosophy and human history. The university should be generously funded as our nuclear program was funded in 70s-80s. On  the defence day, COAS general Qamar Javed Bajwa has also pledged to support political government in eradicating poverty and illiteracy. I am sure he is well aware that our rivals; India and Israel spent 1% and 4.3% of their GDP, respectively,  on research and development, unlike our deplorable figure of less than 0.3%. 

                   The new university in Islamabad (say National University of Pakistan, NUP), should be run on new model, more like The Swedish academy of sciences or academy of Finland. NUP should have a board of governors (BoG) consists of international scientists who can directly report to prime minister and education minister. Four research councils each for natural sciences and technology; social science and humanity; bioscience, health and environment, and religion, should be made. These councils should have 4-5 research-active scientists from Pakistan and abroad recruited only on temporary rota of 2 years. These people should be accessible to students, researchers and scientists of NUP in all possible ways. Alternatively, four centre of excellence (CoE) in aforementioned areas could be established with the help of international scientific community. Each of these CoE should have certain percentage of foreign experts to  foster and maintain quality of this scientific enterprise. Foreign faculty should be hired like Chinese did in Tsinghua university. An international scientific advisory board (SAB) consists of imminent international scholars should regularly evaluate the performance of research faculty and report to BoG. For effective transition of knowledge and expertise from international scientists to our own students, a special postdoctoral program for Pakistani scientists should be started at NUP. Study model of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) should be implemented which allows maximum of 8 years of study in the same institute that includes degree, doctoral and postdoctoral. No one should be allowed to become faculty member if he/she has completed the doctoral degree from the same institute unless he/she spends at least 2 years as faculty member or postdoctorate elsewhere. Like elsewhere in Pakistan, women representation, particularly at policy levels should be ensured. If the NUP model works, it should be extended to other universities with major reforms in HEC-particularly decentralisation of power, external evolution, quality assurance and transparency.