Najam Interviewed on Pakistan’s Research Ecosystem
Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was interviewed for a recent article on the state of the research ecosystem at Pakistan’s universities.
Najam was quoted in a February 17, 2019 article in The News on Sunday entitled “In Search of Research.”
From the text of the article:
Dr Adil Najam, founding Dean on Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies and former Vice Chancellor of LUMS, only partly agrees with Sumaira. “I think Pakistan has a lot of good researchers, especially young researchers, but I do not think our ‘research system’ is working.”
“The research ecosystem is seriously flawed and that we seem to have purposely created bad incentives. The worst, of course, is how we ‘measure’ and reward research in Pakistan,” says Najam, adding, “Simplistically using blunt — and sometimes flawed — measures like impact factors has been a great folly. We have encouraged and rewarded researchers for gaming the system, instead of actually focusing on good research.”
Najam laments a system that can destroy a good scholar. “Looking the other way to plagiarism, and simply doing ‘research-by-metrics’ rather than ‘research-for-impact’ has culminated in a system that can take perfectly good scholars and turn them into sub-standard, often boring, researchers.”
To realize a healthy research environment, Dr Najam proposes serious academic conferences that bring together researchers in different fields together, “to critique each others, rather than the mela conferences — the ones that focus more on dignitaries and chief guests than on researchers themselves.”
Adil Najam is the inaugural dean of the Pardee School and was a former Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore Pakistan. Learn more about him here.