President interviews prospective VCs for three universities

ISLAMABAD: President Mamnoon Hussain personally interviewed each and every short-listed candidate while appointing the heads of three leading federal public sector universities.
“The purpose of the exercise was to get the best in all respects from amongst the applicants,” an informed official told The News.Instead of going by the usual recommendations and selection through official channels, the president decided to personally interview every hopeful, which appeared rare to many bureaucrats. Under the Constitution, the president acts on the advice of the prime minister, and has no discretionary powers which used to be enjoyed by some of his predecessors under the notorious eighth constitutional amendments.
The president recently appointed Prof Javed Ashraf as the Vice Chancellor of Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU), Prof Dr Shahid Siddiqui as the Vice Chancellor of Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU), and Prof Dr Masoom Yasinzai as the Rector of International Islamic University (IIU). The nominations have generally been received well and no objections have been raised from any quarter.
The appointments were pending for several months. The Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training had prepared a panel of nine short-listed names to finally choose three of them.
A seven-member panel was tasked to conduct interviews of candidates for vice-chancellors for QAU and AIOU and rector for the IIU.Dr Shahid Siddiqui has been Professor and Head of the Centre for Humanities & Social Sciences at the Lahore School of Economics.
He obtained his PhD in Applied Linguistics from University of Toronto, Canada, M.Ed TESOL from University of Manchester, UK, and MA English Literature from Pakistan.Dr Masoom Yasinzai whose appointment was confirmed as IIU Rector was already holding the additional charge of the office for the last two years. He had also served as QAU VC for four years.
A search committee had been formed to interview the candidates. Later, a new committee was constituted under the chairmanship of Education Minister Balighur Rehman. This caused somewhat delay in the appointments. The committees went through hundreds of applications for the heads of the three key universities. The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has introduced a policy requiring that heads of universities should be appointed before the expiry of contracts of the incumbents.
According to a report, a total of 150 applications were received for the post of AIOU VC; 129 applications for QAU VC and 90 applications for the IIU rector. Some applicants applied for more than one post.