Dr. Tariq Rahman

The Changing Face of Universities

Those of us who have been brought up in the Western tradition of learning associate a university as a place of higher education in all, or nearly all, subjects. Only about forty years ago universities were generally named after cities and were huge organizations spread out on sprawling campuses. The magic names of Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg, Harvard, Princeton and so on conjured up huge campuses thronged by students in all kinds of clothes. Off and on one would spot an academic who was supposed to be very learned but, of course, somewhat wooly minded in worldly matters---the typical absent minded professor. The university taught all kinds of subjects from nuclear physics to ancient Sanskrit. It had world famous philosophers, historians and scientists though one was lucky to catch a glimpse of them on the streets. Even now, if one is lucky, one can catch a glimpse of Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and the present occupier of Newton’s chair, in the streets of Cambridge between the picturesque medieval colleges. Similarly one may see the figure of Noam Chomsky bustling about the tall modernist buildings of MIT in Boston. But these are apparitions from the past. The university as an institution is changing very fast and right before our eyes.

In the West the university is under threat by market forces and the revolution in information technology (IT). Moreover, the figure of the scholar is losing its special significance or mystique in the public mind. There was, to be sure, some degree of anti-intellectualism in Western culture. A culture so addicted to action; to aggression; to activity; to pioneering and as martial as Western culture could not but have streaks of anti-intellectualism. However, this was balanced by the medieval Church by creating the cultural space called the university. Within the university the more studious types were the butt of ridicule but intellectual achievement was respected too. Both attitudes co-existed in uneasy harmony. As the modern society needed more educated workers the university became the focal place for young people. It became part of the modernist, nationalist enterprise. However, since it had enough money to support most kinds of learning it also remained the refuge of intellectuals---people who enjoyed ideas in themselves whether they could be used for other projects or not.

For some time after the middle of the twentieth century the Western university became a wonderful place. Academics flew around from one conference to another. Money was plentiful and a whole flood of books poured out of the universities. But research became more and more dependent upon grants and these became increasingly scarce in the university itself. The new donors were the military, the industry and the intelligence agencies. This means that scholars who want to do purely independent research find it very difficult to do so. In the sciences, especially in physics, the forces of the state came to control research during World War 2 to the extent that they virtually killed the notion of a community of scholars---scholars without frontiers---sharing knowledge all over the world. In short, the notion of an intellectual space for scholars and intellectuals was besieged by the nationalistic project of power-projection in the West.

The other enemies of the university were market forces and IT. Both eventually boil down to seeing knowledge as a saleable commodity and an investment which will eventually give jobs and help to produce wealth. The IT dream is to eliminate the scholar-professor, who is too costly, and make information available on the students’ computers. Driven by the desire to obtain degrees for jobs students do not see the university as a place where they will interact with each other and the best minds of the age.

In Pakistan and its neighbours the market forces and the state’s project of nationalism are both active. The university is fast ceasing to be the refuge of the intellectual who desires nothing better than the intellectual pleasure of discovering the magic of the poetry of Ghalib or the wonderful logic of pure mathematics. The state talks of subjects useful for upholding its policies i.e creating nationalism, increasing wealth, improving science and technology. The students, faculty and the private sector react to market forces. They want, quite unabashedly, to make more money. Thus the students, and even the intellectuals among them, study that which is marketable i.e business, commerce, I.T, medicine, technology etc. This means that we keep losing our Aristotles and Einsteins to banks and computer firms. The faculty avoids the public universities because they are less paid. They teach in private institutions and, because the temptation to earn money is so great, they become peripatetic lecturers i.e they move from institution to institution delivering lectures which means they can never sit down and do research. This robs us of research scholars---and there were few to begin with.

As for the private entrepreneurs, this is the time for making their fortune and that, exactly, is what they are doing. In Pakistan the number of institutions which call themselves universities, both recognized and unrecognized, has grown so fast in the last ten years that nobody has a complete list of all of them. They are often headed by non-academics, sometimes by retired military officers, which by itself is an idea which old fashioned academics find unacceptable. After all, the university was the only place where academics elected one of their colleagues to hold power over them. Now that power is no longer with the academics. They have lost status. Moreover, the idea that the faculty appoints the administration and not the other way round is lost. Another new reality is that even if one subject is taught, a place can be called a university. Gone is the idea of a place where all branches of human knowledge are available for the seeker. Gone is the idea of interaction with the best minds of the age.

These trends are visible in India, Iran and Bangladesh too. In Iran the state universities have grown from 22 in 1978 to 98 in 2000. Moreover, there are some 33 private institutions of higher education with 23,000 students. Moreover, the Islamic Azad University is active in 110 cities in Iran with more than half a million students. In Iran the percentage of the budget for higher education to the total budget of the government is 3.46 percent. Moreover, the percentage of research budget of universities to total research budget is 27.93 percent. This is much higher than the budget spent on the universities in Pakistan.

In Bangladesh there were 11 state universities in 2000 but two new ones (Bangladesh Sheikh Mujib Agricultural and Bangladesh Sheikh Mujib Medical Universities) were added to this figure. The expenditure on these 11 universities was US$ 53.68 million. In Pakistan, there were 26 public universities in 2000 and the expenditure on them was US$ 39.5 million. In other words, while Bangladesh spends an average of 4.9 million US dollars per year on its universities, Pakistan spends only 1.5 million on each. Though just numbers are not enough to understand what the quality of a university is, it is a good indicator of what priority the decision-makers of a state give to universities.

In short, in Pakistan the state has never really tried to improve the colonial (and inefficient) universities it inherited. Now the state is doing two things. First, it is washing its hands off the universities. It has allowed the mushrooming of universities and even allowed the state’s own agencies, such as the armed forces and their client institutions, to get into the university business. Secondly, the state is allowing its own universities to stagnate which will result in a brain drain of the faculty into the private universities. The social science faculties will probably suffer less from this brain drain in the beginning because private universities in Pakistan are not prepared to invest in the social sciences yet. However, the departments of social sciences in the public universities are already not very attractive so we are in no real danger of producing Bertrand Russels or Chomskys---barring accidents, of course.

In Pakistan, at least, I can see what the process of change will bring about. It will take away the last refuge of the pure intellectual and scholar who requires money, peace, freedom and security to pursue the pleasures of the mind. Another change will be the end of the idea of people interacting with each other; coming across new ideas, even dissident ones; meeting the best minds of the age. All this will come to an end and teachers (not scholars), disseminating knowledge produced by others, will hurry in and out of university campuses flitting from lecture to lecture and never having the time for writing a book. The faculty will become just hirelings without any power in the affairs of the university. And, in true money-making tradition, universities will have campuses in every city to sell their wanes to hordes of buyers and the few relics from older times---like the universities of Karachi, Punjab and Peshawar---will stand as antiques. Maybe even they will change---who knows?

Dr. Tariq Rahman