Pardee Researchers Publish in Nature on Higher Education Reform in Developing Countries

Dr. Athar Osama, a BU Pardee Center Visiting Fellow , and Dr. Adil Najam, the Director of the Pardee Center are amongst the co-authors of a review of Pakistan’s higher education policy reform published in this week’s Nature magazine.

The article is the result of a review of Pakistan’s higher education reform process and is written by an eminent set of experts with deep and direct experience of higher education reform. In addition to Dr. Athar Osama and Dr. Adil Najam, the authors include Dr. Shamsh Kassim-Lakha (Pakistan’s former Minister of Education, Science and Technology and former President of the Aga Khan Univeristy), Dr. Zulfiqar Gilani (former Vice Chancellor, University of Peshawar), and Dr. Christopher King (Editor of ScienceWatch).

The editors of Nature also crafted their own editorial around this article highlighting and reinforcing the findings and recommendations of the article by Osama, Najam, Lakha, Gilani and King (Nature, 461, 3 September 2009, pp. 38-39).

The Nature article reviews the Pakistan’s higher education reform process initiated in 2003 and led by the Pakistan Higher Education Commission (HEC) and concludes:

Highs include more research papers, more PhDs and greater visibility for Pakistani research. The lows include an absence of external peer evaluation and of rigorous impact metrics. At times the speed and scale of reform outpaced the ability of Pakistan’s universities to adapt. And the top-down nature of the revamp also led to distress among faculty members. An important lesson for would-be reformers is that greater participation and openness may increase credibility and sustain support for reforms.

… Arguably… the HEC adopted a much more aggressive approach to reform than it — or Pakistan’s university system — could manage. In some instances, the HEC has been slow to realize the unintended consequences of its programmes. Excessive centralization of the reform effort — which the HEC justified as necessary to keep up momentum — also undermined university leadership and academic freedom.

… [However], the HEC seems to have changed the culture of Pakistani academia considerably over the past 5 years. The HEC claims to have caused a 400% increase in the number of papers published in international journals by Pakistani universities. It also takes credit for the appearance of three Pakistani universities among a popular top-600 chart of world universities, the ranking of Pakistan as a ‘rising star’ in five fields of science and engineering and external endorsements by evaluation teams from the British Council, the World Bank and USAID.

… The strongest criticism of the reforms is that by vesting most powers within one body, the HEC became the initiator, implementer and evaluator, making accountability problematic or impossible. This created opposition from those who might have agreed with the reforms but were opposed to the implementation. Greater transparency and accountability would have diverted some of this criticism.

… The HEC has, over the past few years, made considerable progress. Its success, however, must not be measured by the number of grants made or PhDs awarded. Rather it should be judged on whether it is creating a culture of research — one driven not by financial incentives, but by a genuine desire to create new knowledge and to enable the broader society to reap the benefits. While that remains to be seen, Pakistan’s experience has useful lessons for other countries.

In the accompanying editorial from Nature, the journal’s editors echo the article’s findings and recommendations, including on lessons to be derived from this for other developing countries.