Filling the leadership gap in higher education

Islamabad : These are dire times for higher education. Among many challenges for this sector is the leadership deficit on the top. All eyes are fixed on visionaries like Prof Dr Muhammad Ali in such a situation looking for a way out of this impasse.

Prof Ali is the vice chancellor of Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU), which he has successfully brought to the top position in the country despite the financial crisis which his predecessors never tired of crying on.

“MS and PhD are higher education degrees in real sense. No authority should claim itself to be associated with higher education if it ignores these two degrees,” he said.

Prof Ali spends much of his time in company of young faculty members unlike his contemporaries whom we often find burrowed in piles of files.

“Universities are hard-pressed to change fee constraints. They spend far higher per student than they get from them. Cost of hostels is increasing day by day where people work in shifts,” he said.

He said those who resist fee increase don’t count the overall cost of running departments - payment of salaries, maintenance of buildings and equipment, busses and grounds etc.

He said governments release funds for running universities as increasing fees puts burden on the poor. He regretted that the people whose job it is to plead the case of higher education to the government have failed miserably.

On the recent decay in higher education, he said it has an institutional dimension. “Institutions suffer when you lack sense of leadership and take on role of some imaginative bosses. Things do not work that way. Partnership is the essence of success,” he said.

“Universities are the key and other institutions are to assist them in achieving the goal of quality in higher education. At present, universities are suffering because of the wrong decisions someone else is taking on their behalf. I am the chairman of the committee of vice chancellors and rest assured that our advice is not taken into consideration when these wrong decisions are made,” he said.

He said there no denying the importance of linkages between industry and academia. “But tell me where should subjects like philosophy and history go? Can we afford to ignore them? No,” he said.

He said a society needs skilled people as well as poets, historians, philosophers and theologians etc. It, he said, is responsibility of universities to produce and preserve this critical mass.

He said the government understands the importance of critical mass but the link between universities and the government needs to be re-established. These words from the mouth of someone who brought a cash-starved university in leadership position and who himself have been a leader throughout his career must be heeded.

Prof Ali pressed on the need for research and solutions. He said Dr Attaur Rehman had set a direction for higher education which should be followed. No country can progress ignoring its post-graduation programmes. “It is about time we focused on post-graduation to save our country,” he said.