A Conversation with HEC Executive Director Dr. Sohail Naqvi: Part 1

Editor’s note: Since the establishment of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in 2002, the higher education sector in Pakistan has undergone a transformation both in its size and its nature. Dr. Sohail Naqvi, the Executive Director of the HEC, has been at the helm of many of these changes. STEP’s student editor Mariyam Khalid recently sat down with Dr. Naqvi to learn more about the HEC and its mandate. In the first of this two-part interview, the performance of the HEC, the local relevance of research and other key issues regarding research in Pakistan are examined.

STEP: You have worked as a professor, as a dean, as an industrial entrepreneur and now as a policy-maker in the government. Which of these roles did you find the most rewarding?

SN: I find the one that I’m doing now the most rewarding because of its ability to influence so many factors pertaining to education in Pakistan. But I do miss the university environment, especially the interaction with students. I’ve always loved teaching and being in the classroom. In fact, I sometimes catch myself talking to my colleagues as if I’m lecturing them! So that’s definitely something that I do miss. There is a freedom in being a professor that is simply not available in any other job. When I’ve had it with administration, I can always go back to being a professor.

STEP: Coming to your work in the HEC, very few people managed to survive the change in government. How did you manage to survive the cut?

SN: That is a good question. I have felt that the true challenge to an organization is to move beyond the individual realm, which Pakistan seems to be suffering from, and to build an institution. The true test would be when we would survive an actual change in administration and see whether the HEC is an institution or just a bunch of individuals. So we all took that challenge very seriously. We had been working since the very beginning to institutionalize everything and we had done everything purely on merit. So we just had to buckle down and weather the storm and allow our work to speak for itself. And that is what has happened with the grace of God. We continued to work in an absolutely merit based manner and were not partial to any entity whatsoever and ultimately our work was recognized and we were supported by the new administration as well. Begum Shahnaz Wazir Ali has played a critical role in this transition and without her leadership we would not have survived the cut.

STEP: After the change in government, the HEC’s budget was drastically cut. I would like to congratulate you on having these budget cuts reversed recently. How did you manage to bring this about?

SN: It was actually a very long struggle. We had in fact been working with the World Bank for many years trying to convince them to support the government of Pakistan for the higher education sector. The World Bank had never given any budgetary support loan to any county in the world to support higher education; it had always been lower education or technical education. So we had to work long and hard with them to convince them of the successes of the HEC program and show that this is viable. That came through and helped the government to go over the budgetary shortfalls.

STEP: Do these loans from the World Bank come with any terms?

SN: The terms are financial in nature and do not have any policy implications. This is a budgetary support role, thus the World Bank is supporting the higher education program of the Government of Pakistan and is not funding any one particular initiative. The financial terms are soft and have a ten year grace period, thirty year repayment period and the interest rate is half a percent.

STEP: During your tenure at the HEC, what have been the HEC’s three biggest achievements?

SN: I think that probably the biggest achievement is bringing respect back to the university, through the university and the university faculty; the university as an institution being recognized by the country and its people as something to be proud of, to be nurtured and to be built. That, I think, is something to be proud of. The second would be the rebirth of research in our universities. Whereas universities were indulging in research in a sporadic, individual based manner, now they have taken on the research agenda with much more vigor, with an across the board response to it and this is something that the entire country is involved with. The third thing would be the introduction of a system of education that is compatible with the best in the world, which involved changing the bachelors and masters degree structure, restructuring the four year undergraduate program, introducing a course-based masters, and introducing a course-based PhD, so that the academic structure in Pakistan is compatible with the best structure that is practiced in the world. No Pakistani graduating now can feel that they have gone through a system that is inferior to anybody. The system is not inferior, the system is compatible. Now what matters is the work that you do.

STEP: Have these achievements had any tangible effects up till now?

SN: Most definitely there have been tangible results. We can talk about simple numbers, in terms of the number of students who are engaged in higher education in the country. This was estimated to be 2.6% of the youth population when the HEC started operation and it is now crossing 4.7%. Then, there are a number of disciplinary opportunities that are available to students. Five years ago when you completed an FSc degree in engineering and you did not get into one of the few engineering campuses, basically you had to sit back and figure out, “which college am I going to go to? What am I going to do?” Now it is a completely different scenario. If you’re coming from the IT stream, there is IT, computer science, and telecommunication, but you can also receive undergraduate degrees in physics, mathematics, etc. We have also been able to get people to voluntarily come back to Pakistan as academics. There were many Pakistanis doing PhDs abroad by themselves. They are now choosing to follow an academic discipline in Pakistan. We have a tenure track system, respectable salaries, and a good environment to work in the universities. People are coming back to our public universities and are taking teaching positions over here. In terms of research publications, Pakistan had on the order of 700 or so international publications per year throughout the 90s. In 2008, we crossed the 4000 mark in terms of publications. Just Quaid-e-Azam University alone, which is the number one research university in Pakistan, is crossing 500 publications in one year.

Then, in terms of quality assurance, [we have set up] the entire structure, the mechanism of quality enhancement cells, and accreditation councils. I mean, we never had any mechanisms for checking the quality of computer science programs in Pakistan. We had two year bachelor degrees, three year BCS, four year degrees, BITs, etc. I mean, you think about it, and a nomenclature in the structure existed. Today, we have a single four year undergraduate program. We have an accreditation council and we have a rating system, which is going ahead and checking programs. So in terms of quality, we are a far cry from where we were.

STEP: The HEC’s achievements that you listed are confined entirely to a very small percentage of the population. How do you think the HEC has positively affected society at large?

SN: I think with the society at large, our greatest impact has been on the parents, who are looking to provide university education to their children. We are not having a large impact on the policy-makers, which is where much more work needs to be done. That would mean much greater emphasis on the social sciences and the humanities, and continued capacity building of the faculty members, so that they take a leadership position with the development of policies. You see, universities should have an inherent leadership position in society. They are moving towards that and in some cases they have. I mean, when I switch on the TV and I see, for example, a sociology professor from NED [University] talking, it makes me happy that the media would come to faculty members and look at them as experts. But our society is very large and at a policy level you have got to understand that only one percent of the youth (17 to 23 years of age) or a little more are enrolled in universities. Ninety nine percent are not. Three to Four percent are in colleges, distant education (Allama Iqbal Open University), and other programs such as internal programs, etc. That would still leave 95% out of the loop. That is what is not being understood and that is the biggest battle Pakistan faces, the 95%; what are you going to do about that?

The work of HEC has begun to bring dignity back to our Institutions of higher learning. Society is looking up to them for leadership, industry is coming to them for talent and a solution to their problems. Some new breakthroughs are beginning to surface so the future looks bright.

STEP: But the 95% should also benefit from the HEC work. Shouldn’t research focus on local problems?

SN: Research should focus on local problems. That is something that needs to be done; Research needs to be locally relevant and it needs to be of an international standard. This is where I think that we need to do more work in incentivizing our faculty members to take up local challenges. For example, a manufacturing technology center was put up in UET Lahore, looking at the small to medium scale manufacturing industry that is concentrated in Lahore. An automobile center in Karachi, a date palm research center in Shah Abdul Latif in Khairpur, earthquake engineering machine center in Peshawar … are some examples of how HEC is supporting locally relevant research. But the faculty needs to be motivated to do that, and that requires more work.

STEP: Perhaps the HEC should restrict the research grants to research that focuses on locally relevant problems.

SN: You see there is a supply and demand issue. Pakistan’s problem, and this is something that one needs to really, really understand, is that of capacity. We just don’t have that many researchers, who are doing research. So of these people who are applying for research now, if you want to put in an additional constraint of forcing them to focus on local problems only, then you will have to define what is locally relevant and what is not. That appears to be an easy problem to solve but in practice it would be just about impossible. There are only degrees of relevance here. All research is relevant to Pakistan but the time frame in which it may impact local conditions is going to be different. But then this does not mean that you have to move away from this challenge of getting research to be locally relevant. Let’s say you need to work on the Thar coal fields. You need a large number of experts in various inter-disciplinary fields to actually focus on such problems. You have to understand that practical problems are extremely, extremely complex at times to address. Solving them at times requires you to have a very large team of experts which may not exist at any one university. What you can do and where universities can make a contribution, is to focus on development a little more; that means much more in terms of applied research. Let’s say there is a small factory producing some goods. It is possible to undertake a project to automate the factory units. Maybe you design software to speed things up, you look at the business processes – this is much more in the applied domain, which sort of gets out of the university domain. So this is a challenge in which each of us in the universities and academia has to ask ourselves that question of “how are we going to be relevant?”

STEP: How does the HEC plan to face this challenge?

SN: One thing we are doing in the social science domain is the introduction of thematic research, where themes are identified by groups of local experts, and this is something that we are also going to be introducing in the scientific fields. Our first goal was to get research going, to get people in that mindset – thinking and being inquisitive and innovative. Now, there is the question of starting to channel these resources so that there are, for example, technologists, who can look at food, agriculture, and ways of harvesting, [which is] one of the big areas of possible economic benefit in Pakistan. We could also start looking at issues of health for Pakistan and this has already started to happen. The Center of Excellence in Molecular Biology, for example, is looking at hepatitis and what we can do to locally manufacture interferons to treat this disease. Similarly, things are also beginning to happen in the direction of producing genetically modified crops for Pakistan. It is now necessary to take the next step, identify a number of themes and support research in those identified areas.

STEP: When do you think the common man will start seeing the benefits of this research?

SN: The common man has started to benefit. For example, this interferon developed by the Center of Excellence in Molecular Biology is ready for human testing. The problem is that the protocols for human testing in Pakistan are not yet well defined, since this is the first time this has happened. As soon as that happens, we are talking about millions of hepatitis infected patients being able to be treated by a medicine developed in Pakistan. Similarly, there are other products, and these days we are trying to put together an intellectual property portfolio for Pakistan, where we would categorize these [products] and try to get local or foreign investments going. The next challenge is to get research out of universities and into the industry domain. There are other interesting possibilities, such as salt-tolerant crops, which can be used as fodder for animals and can grow in millions of acres in Baluchistan. There are some vaccines that are being developed for animals, poultry, cows, etc., with huge benefits. So there is this kind of work which is beginning to show up, which is of commercial interest and will impact the common man. I am hoping in the next five year time-frame that these products, at least some of them, should be in the market.

STEP: A major challenge the HEC faces is the “elitist” quality of Pakistan’s higher education. How do you plan to face this challenge?

SN: Well, the way we are doing it is multi-pronged. We are taking higher education out of the main city framework so you have universities now in Malakand, in Hazara, in Sargodha, in Gujrat…so we have enlarged that domain. And we provided them with the latest IT technology so that they are linked. The other thing is this entire issue of a need based scholarship framework, in which we are providing scholarships and developing the capacity of need assessment so that you can actually identify who requires financial aid and who doesn’t require financial aid. The third path is the outreach path, where you are actively going into the rural schools or the suburban schools of Multan or Dera Ghazi Khan and building the capacity of students from the schools in these regions to take entrance examinations of top universities in Pakistan. All three approaches together are addressing the key issue of equitable access to higher education in Pakistan.

STEP: What were some of the policies or plans that did not do as well as you were hoping?

SN: I think the issue of governance has been the most difficult because, you may not know it, in the early days there was a great talk about the Model University Ordinance. There was talk about restructuring the existing universities and bringing in new governance structures. It was not accepted by the faculty and that was one of the areas where we did not make much headway. That is the only one I can think of at this time.

STEP: What about the HEC’s plan to build universities with foreign aid?

SN: Yes, that was another policy put in place much later, to build these mega universities. It is not on the table anymore. We have decided to scrap those projects and to rethink them and redesign these as well. They were too big and too ambitious, and if you combine that with the worldwide economic recession, then it is clear that the project is no longer viable.

STEP: One of the justifications for these mega-universities was that because of the PhD scheme we will have many PhDs returning to Pakistan without institutions to absorb them. Now that the mega university project has been scrapped, do you think we have the universities to absorb the incoming PhDs?

SN: The current fraction of PhD qualified faculty in our universities is hardly crossing 24% at this time. Three out of four faculty members do not have PhDs even currently. The student-teacher ratios are high and the demands are extreme. We have new campuses opening up, we have a rapidly expanding university system growing at a rate of about 15% per year. Now to cater to this growth of 15% alone would require an addition of about a thousand to twelve hundred teachers per year. So there is no shortage of capacity to absorb PhD qualified faculty in our universities. Also, as research is taking a hold in our universities, research groups in different areas are beginning to form in different institutions. This in turn feeds the demand for additional highly qualified faculty which is going to be available in the future.

STEP: So they will have jobs when they return?

SN: Yes they have jobs; in fact the HEC guarantees them a job. Any new PhD will be hired by the HEC for the first year if they cannot find a job; so that is not an issue.