State of social sciences in Pakistan needs improvement

LAHORE

Centre for Governance and Policy of the Information Technology University (ITU) hosted a talk on “The State of Social Sciences in Pakistan: Still Dismal a Decade Later?” here on Thursday. According to a press release, Professor Dr. S. Akbar Zaidi, who teaches at Columbia University and IBA Karachi, was the speaker. He noted that he wrote a report on the state of social sciences in 2001, just when the HEC was being set up. 

At that time the social sciences were almost dead, both in terms of numbers and quality. Hoping to update his earlier work taking into consideration the education revolution which has occurred in the intervening 15 years, Dr. Zaidi noted that the time had come to undertake an empirical study of the state of social sciences in Pakistan.

Dr. Zaidi noted: ‘The HEC has caused a sea change in Pakistan.’ Now a number of people are coming back after getting their PhD’s abroad, people who left in the 1980’s to work for International Financial Institutions are retiring and coming back, and that there has been a boom in the number of private universities. 

Counting all these happenings as positive Dr Zaidi, who is a renowned political economist and historian, underscored that scholars should not ‘do NGO research, but real social science research.’ He argued the proliferation of NGOs and donor-led research had been the biggest hindrance in the development of social sciences in Pakistan. “Scholars get lured into consultancies due to the high rates of pay, but then they produce so-called research which is neither peer reviewed nor robust, and in fact secretive,” he exclaimed. “Such research is of no use,” Dr Zaidi added. Dr Zaidi also emphasised that while the numbers have exponentially increased the quality remains very low. “Journals in the 1980’s were better than they are today in Pakistan,” he lamented.