Pakistan is Academic Scholarship Deprived

All over the world, it is the academia that generates public discourse, engages the youth into problems that concern society at large and undertakes research work in attempts to find answers for questions no one yet has. It has only been a little more than a decade since the High Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan expanded its program and financed or at least tried to finance PhD programs for faculty here in Pakistan, yet we can only find a fraction of accomplished PhDs here compared to all of Pakistan’s neighboring states.

Why can we only name a few internationally known academics from Pakistan, that too in some specific fields, many whom no longer reside in Pakistan? You would find thousands of research papers and studies done in India on a whole variety of issues such as voter behavior to perhaps even the impact of urbanization on the remote tribes of the jungle in India. Why is there such a divide? Where have we gone wrong?

First, let us discuss the difficulties of conducting research in Pakistan. Research work is not taken very seriously, it is seen as menial or secondary, one without much value therefore the environment that academics work within is not very supportive. This discourages people to take up research projects in Pakistan. It is also notoriously difficult to find suitable supervisors for a variety of fields especially within the humanities field –an area of research which is very essential for studying the Pakistani society. There is also extensive red tape around archives within Pakistan, which only perpetuates the narrative of a clear but subtle blockade on free information from the security state.

Government-owned national and provincial archives often deny access to academics if they feel that the kind of research work being done would be overly critical, most of the time one would also need political connections to be able to gain access regardless of the kind of research being conducted. Such a situation makes it difficult to conduct quality research work but also discourages prospective post-doctoral candidates from undertaking such a task in the first place.

The grave lack of facilities for the social sciences and humanities still prevents the flowering of scholars in Pakistan. How can a person write a decent book on, say history, when there is no decent library in Pakistan where he/she can conduct secondary reading? The Punjab Public Library today has half the number of books it once had in 1947.

There is also a general lack of government support for academia in Pakistan. Dr Ammar Ali Jan, who has written his doctoral thesis on Communism in colonial India at Cambridge University was removed from his post at Punjab University as he came at political odds with the state. The few internationally renowned academics of Pakistani origin you would find work abroad like Professor Ayesha Jalal or Dr. Atif Mian (who was removed from his position on the Economic Advisory Council in 2018) as the environment within Pakistan is one which does not support them. It is also true that funding by the HEC is provided only in specific fields, particularly Nuclear Physics as that is something which may aid in supporting the security state, a whole variety of other fields are not given much importance.

In 2019, the federal government communicated to the HEC that there would be funding slash, which has led the HEC to decrease the amount of funding provided to students pursuing higher education in Pakistan and abroad. There has been a mushrooming of Private and State-owned universities however there has been a significant lack of policy initiatives to improve the quality of existing universities, especially in terms of evaluating the research produced. Plagiarism cases keep appearing with disturbing frequency, the HEC itself is not immune to such scandals.

Pursuing a Ph.D. is a very expensive ordeal and most aspiring students are unable to fund it on their own. There is minimal private funding available in Pakistan and most of the non-governmental funding that students manage to secure is from funds created by foreign governments and non-governmental organizations. One could make the case that because these students are funded from the foreign organizations, they don’t have an incentive to come back and work in Pakistan as they would if funded by the HEC.

The HEC itself prioritizes programs it considers relatively ‘cheaper’ while compromising on the quality, so many of the academics who return after their doctorates are in stark contrast with those who end up leaving. But why do so many leading academics end up leaving? Salaries and research grants.

The wages paid to professors in Pakistan are significantly lower than those paid in the neighboring gulf and the west, most faculty find it difficult to resist the offer of such high wages up for offer. In Pakistan, faculty have not seen pay raises in the last five years. In fact, their benefits are being cut, more appointments are being made on a contractual basis and promotion criteria are being tightened. A recent survey conducted concerning faculty at the National University for Sciences and Technology (NUST) showed that almost all faculty members are unable to afford housing in the city and have to commute from afar. The Gulf states, in a push to further industrialize and develop their own highly skilled workforce offer lucrative salary packages and hire Pakistani faculty -often trained at great expense of the Pakistani government.

But why is academia so important? All over the world, it is the academia who have acquired a great deal of expertise in their respective fields and it is they who advise the government on important policy, in order to generate the best outcome. The greater the presence of academia, the better the policymaking of the state can be.

Public discourse is often led by experts, who are invited on television shows, write columns in leading papers on various issues. In Pakistan, most of the discourse is led by news anchors who have gained celebrity status and seem to pass off as experts.

While the oft-repeated philosophy of how ‘education’ is the answer to all of Pakistan’s problems is too simplistic and probably misguided, the presence of public intellectuals could very much help in changing the kind of discourse that is present in Pakistan. Most people would not be able to name anyone other than Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy as an academic they’re aware of, as the public limelight rarely gleans on anyone other than those of uniform or of high office. Most importantly, the presence of a strong academia produces or ushers social change, it plays a great role in modernizing the kind of research tools employed in Pakistan, encourages more people to take up such a field, improves the quality of the existing crop we have -which is strife with plagiarism.

It was academics such as Dr Salam, Dr Munir and Dr Mahbub ul Haq who proved pivotal in the setting up of Pakistan’s nuclear program, made the way for Pakistan’s associate membership of CERN and set up the building blocks of the modern Pakistani economy.

There is a great need for government support for the thriving of academic scholarship in Pakistan, not only in terms of funding but also in terms of providing the right sort of environment to conduct research and provide better facilities.