Cruel mathematics
January 15, 2009
The humble statistic is the great enabler of cruelty in society. When data about people is organised and eventually summed up in the form of statistics, it robs them of their individuality, in fact, their humanity.
Bureaucrats get their reputation for being cold because they deal with numbers, never seeing the human faces those numbers represent. When this government decided to scale back the HEC funding so it could undo a legacy of Musharraf and his appointee, it probably thought the consequence would only be a few hundred individuals around the country.
Right now, there are several hundred students who had visas and admissions in top-notch research programmes around the world stranded in Pakistan, especially after they quit their jobs to go back into academia. The amount of money the HEC requires to continue this pales in comparison with the expenses of this bloated cabinet that does not have the competence to deal with a diplomatic crisis, to announce the right prices of CNG or fix the newest judicial crisis of confidence.
Potentially, these budding scholars could end up doing more than what it costs to train them. Our universities should be oases free from the dysfunction of society, but they are not. They are mired in static thought, a didactic approach to knowledge and an absolutely dire lack of exposure.
That doesn't seem to matter to the government, which in this case is less of a Pakistan People's Party and more of an entity that is creating Policy Pillorying People. Here, in the case of this programme of the HEC there is no one who can be obliged or can oblige; thus they have no representation.
But coming back to statistics. Of all the people affected in both domestic and foreign PhD, let me explain the case of one of them, and by extension the power for change we could have by continuing this investment in higher order intellectual capital.
The young man's name is Akif Zeb who was a student at Hazara University, who did his MSc in inorganic/analytical chemistry. Buoyed by the possibilities of what the HEC was offering, he turned his academic efforts around. With an idea in mind for his research project he went around the country to get his literature survey done, put in his own money for testing in five cities and eventually got a foreign publication out of it, a first at that level for his department.
Akif's father is a retired teacher, the only breadwinner in the family, and also suffers from diabetes and hypertension. With this in mind, it was only the state funding higher education that would have allowed Akif to move forward. When he got into an indigenous PhD programme, funding was cancelled. Since he couldn't afford the indigenous PhD he was admitted to, he had to cancel. His frustration is supreme, because the programme promised to be the great equaliser, one that channelled his interests, and, as he wrote to me, "Who are these politicians to demolish our careers, Why? Just because we do not belong to 1% elite class?"
This is one story, there are hundreds more. The key to the HEC was a desire for transformation of the entropied intellectual culture of our universities, where the passion to teach, to learn and generate new knowledge was gone. It was bringing in new blood which had spent years learning how to research and also developed a contact base out of which, thanks to new communication technologies, they no longer had to be stationed abroad.
I am sure much of what the HEC has done can be questioned, but these programmes had merit. And even if there wasn't enough positions to absorb the returning scholars, they would be of use to Pakistan even if they chose to stay. That's how the Indian revolution got kick-started through returning NRIs.
Sadly, this is not about money. The money is there, what's lacking is something that makes up for a paucity of billions. Political will. Sincerity of purpose.
The writer is a Rhodes scholar and former academic. Email: fasizaka@ yahoo.com
Bureaucrats get their reputation for being cold because they deal with numbers, never seeing the human faces those numbers represent. When this government decided to scale back the HEC funding so it could undo a legacy of Musharraf and his appointee, it probably thought the consequence would only be a few hundred individuals around the country.
Right now, there are several hundred students who had visas and admissions in top-notch research programmes around the world stranded in Pakistan, especially after they quit their jobs to go back into academia. The amount of money the HEC requires to continue this pales in comparison with the expenses of this bloated cabinet that does not have the competence to deal with a diplomatic crisis, to announce the right prices of CNG or fix the newest judicial crisis of confidence.
Potentially, these budding scholars could end up doing more than what it costs to train them. Our universities should be oases free from the dysfunction of society, but they are not. They are mired in static thought, a didactic approach to knowledge and an absolutely dire lack of exposure.
That doesn't seem to matter to the government, which in this case is less of a Pakistan People's Party and more of an entity that is creating Policy Pillorying People. Here, in the case of this programme of the HEC there is no one who can be obliged or can oblige; thus they have no representation.
But coming back to statistics. Of all the people affected in both domestic and foreign PhD, let me explain the case of one of them, and by extension the power for change we could have by continuing this investment in higher order intellectual capital.
The young man's name is Akif Zeb who was a student at Hazara University, who did his MSc in inorganic/analytical chemistry. Buoyed by the possibilities of what the HEC was offering, he turned his academic efforts around. With an idea in mind for his research project he went around the country to get his literature survey done, put in his own money for testing in five cities and eventually got a foreign publication out of it, a first at that level for his department.
Akif's father is a retired teacher, the only breadwinner in the family, and also suffers from diabetes and hypertension. With this in mind, it was only the state funding higher education that would have allowed Akif to move forward. When he got into an indigenous PhD programme, funding was cancelled. Since he couldn't afford the indigenous PhD he was admitted to, he had to cancel. His frustration is supreme, because the programme promised to be the great equaliser, one that channelled his interests, and, as he wrote to me, "Who are these politicians to demolish our careers, Why? Just because we do not belong to 1% elite class?"
This is one story, there are hundreds more. The key to the HEC was a desire for transformation of the entropied intellectual culture of our universities, where the passion to teach, to learn and generate new knowledge was gone. It was bringing in new blood which had spent years learning how to research and also developed a contact base out of which, thanks to new communication technologies, they no longer had to be stationed abroad.
I am sure much of what the HEC has done can be questioned, but these programmes had merit. And even if there wasn't enough positions to absorb the returning scholars, they would be of use to Pakistan even if they chose to stay. That's how the Indian revolution got kick-started through returning NRIs.
Sadly, this is not about money. The money is there, what's lacking is something that makes up for a paucity of billions. Political will. Sincerity of purpose.
The writer is a Rhodes scholar and former academic. Email: fasizaka@ yahoo.com
