Almost every country wants a ‘world-class university”. Pakistan says it will establish nine in the next decade with help from Europe; Qatar has imported local campuses of several well-known United States universities to create an ‘education city”; and the director general of the Organisation of Islam Countries has appealed for at least 20 of its member states’ universities to be raised to ‘world-class quality”.
This is not surprising. Universities are the engines driving national growth in a world of fiercely competitive knowledge-based economies. But when can a university rightfully be called ‘world class”?
Some, like the University of Jammu in Kashmir and the MARA University of Technology in Malaysia, stake their claim on certification from the International Standards Organisation (ISO) — dubious because ISO merely looks at the adequacy of procedural and management processes.
Rankings, such as the United Kingdom’s Times Higher Education supplement and the top-500 list compiled by China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University, often differ sharply from one another.
So let us create our own yardstick for the hypothetical ‘ideal [world-class] university”.
This university is a bastion of critical inquiry. Its professors are widely cited and known for important discoveries, their fame attracting researchers and students from across the world.
The ideal university spawns high-tech companies and generates products and ideas upon which civilisation’s progress and survival depend. It does a splendid job of training professionals. These graduates can think independently and scientifically, have an understanding of history and culture, can create discourses on social and political issues, and are capable of coherent expression in speech and writing. They are in demand everywhere.
Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge and Oxford are mere approximations of this high ideal. So how does one create something akin to this in a developing country? Money and resources are necessary, but they are not enough.
Faculty (academic staff) is the biggest challenge. Unless there is an attractive research environment, a university can end up with second-rate foreign academics looking for cushy jobs.
An ambitious $4,3-billion project to create nine Pakistani-European engineering universities with 50% of the faculty and administrators from Europe is an example of how not to proceed.
The official opening of the first of these universities, in collaboration with a French consortium, is scheduled for October. But the situation on the ground is dismal. Because of Pakistan’s dangerous security situation, the French are absent. But even if the Europeans come, there are not enough Pakistani staff to teach at these universities. And given the crisis in science education in Pakistan, there are simply not enough well-prepared students to take advantage of the high-level university instruction.
Another difficulty universities face is ensuring academic freedom. A university cannot do meaningful teaching and research unless authority and conventional wisdom can be challenged.
Still more important is freedom of cultural and personal expression. As a professor at a Pakistani university, I have observed that our female students, after being forced under the veil in recent years, have largely become timid, silent note-takers.
Ethical behaviour is also vital. Cheating in examinations, plagiarising research papers and fabricating scientific data are enormously destructive of the institutional ethos — especially if insufficiently punished. In developing countries, national policies that give strong incentives for publications can end up creating a plagiarism pandemic. Unlike hospitals or factories, well-functioning universities cannot be imported. They can only come from an organic, evolutionary process internal to a society. Being labelled ‘world-class” is a nice token, but it is much more important for a university to have a forward-looking world view, an open environment, high ethical standards, a sense of collegiality and shared sense of purpose, and good governance practices. — www.SciDev.Net
Pervez Hoodbhoy is chairperson of the department of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan