Pakistan and Education

 

Dons, donors and the murky business of funding universities

John Lloyd in The Financial Times

The University of Oxford is in constant need of money — and it takes an approach to raising it that oscillates between the severe and the relaxed. Those familiar with its procedures say many would-be donors have been turned away. No names are given, outside of senior common room gossip. “Oxford doesn’t need to compromise,” says Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of the independent Buckingham University. “People want to be associated with it.” But that confident sense that the great universities will do the right thing has been called into question by a Swedish academic who has thrown down the gauntlet to one of Oxford’s most prominent donors. 

For many centuries the deal has been clear: donations buy gratitude and even a named chair or library, but no rights to influence the running of the institution. In return, barring evidence of illegality, the university will not probe the funder’s finances. “You don’t have to like sponsors,” says the Canadian scholar Margaret MacMillan, an admired contemporary historian and former warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford. “But if they don’t interfere with your teaching and your choice of colleagues, then the rest is their own affair.” 

The Rhodes scholarship is a case in point. It began in 1902 with a bequest from Cecil Rhodes, the enthusiastic imperialist who argued that Anglo-Saxons deserved to be the dominant global race. His scholarship was founded to bring “the whole of the uncivilised world under British rule”, by funding young men to Oxford. Two years ago a South African Rhodes scholar, Ntokozo Qwabe, started a campaign to recognise the “colonial genocide” underpinning Rhodes’ wealth. He called for the removal of his statue from Oriel College, Rhodes’ alma mater. The campaign escalated, but the university and college resisted and the statue still stands. 

You cannot accept stolen money, but who is to decide what is stolen? Money from the oligarchs? 

A more recent bequest, beginning with £20m in 1985 and rising to over £50m, is that of the Syrian-born businessman Wafic Saïd to Oxford’s business school, which bears his name. With high-level contacts in the Saudi royal family, Saïd had helped to arrange the Al-Yamamah contracts between Saudi Arabia and British Aerospace and other UK companies from the mid-1980s onwards, worth some £44bn. In the 2000s it emerged that millions of pounds had been paid to senior Saudi royals to smooth the deal. BAE agreed to pay over £250m in the US in 2010, after the Department of Justice found it guilty of “intentionally failing to put appropriate anti-bribery preventive measures in place”. No wrongdoing was proved against Saïd, who said he had received no commissions for assisting in the deal. Last year, he opened legal proceedings against Barclays Bank, which had forced him to close several accounts, and had told him he was no longer welcome as a customer. (He later dropped the lawsuit after the bank apologised and confirmed the closures had been a business decision that was not based on any wrongdoing in relation to account activity.) 

The traditional argument justifying such relationships is ensuring a robust division between gift and subsequent influence. The economist and FT commentator John Kay, the first director of the Saïd Business School (1997-99), says he takes “a relaxed view of the relationship between the leadership of a university or college and the donor. It’s rare to have a very rich donor who has accumulated his wealth by simple hard work and dedication to honest business. There’s often something like monopolistic practices. You cannot accept stolen money, but who is to decide what is stolen? Money from the oligarchs? From Nigerian businessmen?” 

Seldon at Buckingham adds, “Even if it’s bad money, it can serve good causes. The key thing is that there are no conditions attached, and that there is a clear statement of the establishment of a firewall between the money and the decisions of the institute. We would all be in a pickle if we were to be morally pure.” 

Bo Rothstein, a former professor at Oxford University who resigned his post in protest against one of its funders But moral purity has come to Oxford, in the shape of Professor Bo Rothstein. A fellow of Nuffield College, Rothstein is a Swedish sociologist whose work has centred on ethical issues, most recently on studies of corruption in government. In 2015, he joined the faculty at the Blavatnik School of Government — where, in early August, he learnt that Len Blavatnik, the billionaire Ukrainian-born businessman whose £75m gift had founded the school, had given $1m to help finance Donald Trump’s inauguration. Blavatnik, one of Britain’s richest men, was knighted this year for services to philanthropy: he has given large sums to the Tate Modern and, with the New York Academy of Sciences, has established the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists. After a pause for reflection, Rothstein resigned in protest. 

Rothstein believes Trump is an existential danger to western values. To become entangled financially with such a man in any way, he argues, is an affront to both universal and university values. “I teach about the importance of rights,” he says. “How am I to explain to a student why I am giving legitimacy, by teaching at the school, to one who gives money to him? It’s impossible.” How far would you take this argument, he adds. “Would you take money from one who was a Nazi? Would you have a Hermann Göring chair of aviation?” 

Rothstein’s challenge to Oxford’s see-no-evil consensus has brought him into conflict with one of the university’s brightest stars, the economist and international-relations scholar Professor Ngaire Woods. It was Woods who conceived of and secured the funding for the Blavatnik School of Government, becoming its founding director in 2011. 

She disputes almost everything Rothstein says about the immediate aftermath of his resignation — something he refers to as an “excommunication”, because he was asked to leave the school very soon after his resignation. On the central issue, she says that “we do not tell our donors how to exercise their political points of view; they do not tell us how to run the institute. Len Blavatnik has never said anything to me about what I should do or how I should teach. Never. Not once. There was a representative of the donor on the building committee for the institute, as is the Oxford practice, and that has been the extent of it.” 

Woods believes Rothstein had not grasped the difference between supporting Trump’s campaign and giving to the inauguration. “Lots of people give money to the inauguration, because it can’t be paid for from government funds,” she points out. “You cannot seriously think that the institute is in some way linked to Trump. We teach our students to try to get the facts right, to reason and to learn from diversity. We recently held a ‘challenges to government’ conference, in which all the issues of governance were debated. We have an open, argumentative centre.” 

Rothstein’s campaign has been a lonely one, not least given that established opinion in Oxford is squarely against him. Macmillan says that “to give money for Trump’s inaugural was quite legal, a perfectly sensible thing to do. I think he [Rothstein] put himself in an indefensible position.” Kay commends Rothstein for having the courage of his convictions, and “not engaging in a protest which costs nothing in the way of harm to the protester, but accepting the damage this will do to his position”, but he believes he was wrong to act as he did. At Buckingham, Seldon says: “I have sympathy for what he has done, but if the Blavatnik institute gets money that is unattached, and it’s clear there must be no influence, then that is OK.” 

This consensual view is anathema to Rothstein, a Luther among Renaissance popes. “Trump is a very serious threat to liberal democracy. My colleagues think it’s not too serious. Some say we shouldn’t oppose him head on, but we should just give the platform to strong liberals and democrats. But I am not keen on that. It’s trying to take a middle course which, with Trump, now you cannot take.” 

Rothstein sees the infamous case involving the London School of Economics as proving his point. In 2008, the LSE’s Global Governance Centre accepted a donation of £1.5m from Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the long-time despot of Libya, Muammer Gaddafi. 

Amid charges that a PhD had been awarded to Saif improperly, and after a speech in Tripoli in 2011 in which he promised “rivers of blood” to flow if protests against his father’s regime did not stop, the LSE acknowledged it had erred in pursuing the relationship and in taking the money. The then-director, Sir Howard Davies, resigned. Says Rothstein: “There are of course donors whose behaviour you cannot just ignore and say, ‘Well, it’s their business.’ ” 

Rothstein has at least one prominent supporter in the academy, back in his native Sweden: the president of the Stockholm School of Economics, Lars Strannegård. “I think he was right to do it. Things which a year ago were thought not even to be allowed to be said are now daily announced from the White House. This strikes at the core of what universities do. It is like when you dip a watercolour brush into water — the first time it is slightly darkened, then more, and more until it is completely dark.” 

The Blavatnik affair finds an echo in the 1951 CP Snow novel, The Masters. Set in a Cambridge college in 1937, it concerns a struggle over the election of a new master — the two main contestants being an establishment figure seeking to bolster his chances by attracting a donation, and a radical scientist determined the college should take a stance against the steady advance of fascism. 

But universities are now far from Snow’s times. Those who now run them attest to a much more harried life than in the past. The state has retreated from full funding — universities charge fees, and most have created units that raise money — but it now expects higher teaching and research standards. At the same time as the universities have come under more intense financial pressure, their student bodies have become more combative. Aside from the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, there has been a rash of “no platforming” incidents in which controversial speakers have been barred from appearing on campus. 

More threatening still are the campaigns to force universities to divest themselves of investment considered unethical. Cambridge university has ceased investment in coal and tar sand “heavy” oil, but the pressure to go further is intensifying. Many students, faculty members and influential figures including Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and now master of Magdalene College, are calling for Cambridge to divest from all energy companies. So far the university has resisted, but Nick Butler, a former senior executive in BP and now a visiting professor at King’s College London, believes the tide runs against them. “The universities don’t want to be told what to do with their money,” he says. “But I think that, since the protests will continue, more and more will give in.” 

Money is power, but so is a university, especially one as storied as Oxford. Large donors are not always kept at arm’s length, and influences can be subtle, a question of implicit understandings more than explicit direction. They can also be fruitful: as a co-founder of the university’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2006), whose funding comes largely from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, I think it right that Reuters representatives sit on the committees of the institute — balancing those who represent the interests of the university. The idea was, in part, to have the academy and the journalism trade interact and inform each other — not always without friction, but always with benefits. 

Donor-ship is an increasingly complex business in the digital age. What once might have been a campus kerfuffle can become a global furore. Last month, Washington DC saw such a dispute when a scholar named Barry Lynn was fired from the New America Foundation think-tank (not attached to a university) by its chief executive, Anne-Marie Slaughter. Lynn had written a statement about Google and “other dominant platform monopolists” and called for more robust antitrust action against them. Google, a major funder of the foundation, complained via Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of its parent company, Alphabet, according to the New York Times. Slaughter, a former director of policy planning at the State Department, at first called the Times’ report false, then backtracked. She later conceded: “There are unavoidable tensions the minute you take corporation funding or foreign government funding.” 

Universities must now manage tensions more actively than before; in doing so, all make deals and ethical zigzags. The two main protagonists in this updated CP Snow imbroglio deserve each other, for both are driven: Woods, by a desire to fashion her school into a world centre for the study of good governance; Rothstein, by a hyperactive political conscience that demanded a demonstrative act, essential to dramatise the scale of the disaster that, he believes, the Trump presidency presages. Two beliefs clash: one, that continuing to offer a rational-liberal education will maintain and expand rational-liberal governance; the other, that these very assumptions are being destroyed, and that larger protest must be made. Both are, at root, principled. Both cannot be right.

Many names for a PhD

Chidanand Rajghatta in the Times of India


Pathetic homeless dork. Patiently hoping for degree. Professor had doubts. These are some expansions for the much-vaunted acronym PhD, formally a Doctor of Philosophy no matter what one's subject of research and expertise. Regarded as the acme of scholarship, it stands at a rarefied academic height that takes immense effort and time to reach. Probably heavily in Debt, please hire -- desperate, and patently headed downhill are some of the other self-deprecating expansions doctoral candidates throw out to explain their striving.

Which one of these gloomy explanations applied to IIT-Stanford alumnus Mainak Sarkar as he lost it one fine morning last week is hard to say. Perhaps all. He loaded up two guns he had purchased, broke into the home in Minnesota of his estranged wife Ashley and shot her dead. He then drove 2500km to snuff out the life of his PhD adviser and professor William Klug at the University of California (UCLA) in Los Angeles.

Mainak Sarkar met every gratuitous grad student putdown -- to a high degree.

The life of an Indian PhD scholars in the US centers around ''adviser and Budweiser,''goes an old joke in desi circles. They are generally regarded as a quiet, reticent, insular, and industrious lot, who tread the straight path between lab, library, home, and an occasional beer. American universities covet them because of their undemanding and non-confrontational nature, and the fealty and value they bring to the program. Often socially awkward and taciturn, many work doubly hard and wrap up their degree in quick time.

From all accounts, Sarkar conformed to the mould. Hailing from a modest Bengali family from Durgapur, where his father was a clerk in a cement factory, he was said to be a bright student in school. Accounts from his college years suggest he was introverted. After a bachelor's degree from IIT Kharagpur in 2000, he worked briefly at Infosys in Bangalore before heading out to Stanford for his master's, a route taken by many Indians, notably Google's Sundar Pichai.

But while IITian titans such as Vinod Khosla and Pichai chose to do an MBA after their masters, setting the template for what many of today's US-bound Indian engineers do, Sarkar opted for the road less travelled these days because of the toil and hardship involved: A PhD program -- at UCLA's Henri Samueli School of Engineering.

PhD programs can be brutal. In fact, such is the struggle involved in earning a doctorate that a dedicated satirical strip called PhD comics by former grad student Jorge Cham, which follows the lives of several doctoral students, is a must-read for the PhD crowd. PhD in this instance stands for Piled Higher and Deeper, a degree that follows BS (Bull Shit) and MS (More of the Same). From the difficulties of research to the complex student-adviser equation, Cham explores the exhausting grind of the indigent PhD scholar, from slumming it out in deadbeat digs to the perpetual search for free food.

Central to the strip is the tortured time-span of a PhD program that appears to be interminable. One brilliant strip shows a fresh PhD candidate in his first year announce to the world ''Here I come!'' with visions of winning the Nobel Prize, and in the second year, revolutionizing the field. By the third year, he is reduced to hoping he'll get a job in the university, and by the fourth year, just get any job, anywhere. By the fifth year, he's just hoping to attend some conference in Podunk, Minnesota, and wishing they will lay out pepperoni pizza.

Mainak Sarkar's struggle to earn his doctorate extended to at least eight years, in part because he was locked in a grad student's ultimate nightmare: an adversarial relationship with the guide/mentor/supervisor. ''You can't even begin to describe the sense of gloom and doom,'' one grad student who has been through the mill explained. ''And it gets worse as people who joined the program after you graduate before you, and you are still there, hanging on in quiet desperation.''

The situation has gotten worse in recent years with US universities awarding doctoral degrees at an accelerating pace (nearly 60,000 annually), despite the economic downturn proving a dampener for the career prospects of those who graduate. According to one recent study, less than 17% of new PhDs in science, engineering and health-related fields find tenure-track positions within three years after graduation. Stress levels are high and fear and frustration are endemic at the prospect of seeing a lifetime of study not pay off.

Already 38, Sarkar struggled to make a living after a tortured academic career culminating in a PhD that was grudgingly granted to him in 2013 (earlier versions of this story said he was a grad student into his tenth year, but Klug colleagues have said they graduated him in 2013 despite his subpar thesis mainly to get rid of him). He then took up a job in Ohio, working remotely as an engineering analyst. For reasons unknown, it did not last long. Nor did his marriage.

It is not clear what role his personal turmoil played in the deterioration on the academic front or whether it was the other way around. But early this year Sarkar started ranting online about his adviser Klug, accusing him of stealing his code and passing it to other students.

Such intellectual property spats are not uncommon in the doctoral research world, though the UCLA Engineering School, named after its professor Henri Samueli, is a standout example of an ideal mentor-mentee relationship. Samueli and his PhD student Henry Nicholas founded Broadcom, a chip company that topped $150 billion in market cap at the height of the dotcom bubble and sold for $37 billion a couple of years ago. It is arguably the most successful teacher-student collaboration in history in financial terms.

The Sarkar-Klug ties didn't follow the script. It ended in death - a murder-suicide that took them both to a different PhD: A premature and horrible Death.

Enough PhD’s, thank you

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

When Freeman Dyson suggested we have lunch together at the Princeton University cafeteria on my next visit, I almost fell off my chair. To be invited by this legendary physicist, now 90-plus but sharp as ever, meant more than a banquet especially arranged for me by the Queen of England. Countless kings, queens, and generals have come and gone but only a tiny number of visionaries, Dyson included, actually make history.

Overwhelmed, I was about to blurt “thank you, Dr Dyson” but stopped in time. Else this would have violated an unstated protocol. We theoretical physicists address colleagues by their first name. And so I simply thanked him as Freeman. This avoided a still more serious error. Freeman Dyson does not have a PhD and has never sought or needed one.

Three books and biographies have been written on this PhD-less scientific genius. But, were he to apply to a Pakistani university, at best he might become an assistant professor. I thought of this while suffering through some lectures last week at an international physics conference in Islamabad.

Sadly, the presentations by most Pakistani PhD’s were uninteresting, others were wrong. One was even laughably wrong. Probably the worst was by a professor who was not just a ‘doctor’ but a ‘professor doctor’. This terrible pomposity, borrowed from some German tradition, is now routinely augmented with ‘distinguished professor’, ‘national professor’ and what-not. Like cartoon generals who have won no wars but have medals stuck to oversized chests, Pakistan now has legions of highly paid ignoramus cartoon professors.

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Pakistan now has legions of highly paid ignoramus cartoon professors.

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But wait, am I not being terribly unfair? Our professors are publishing huge numbers of research papers these days, almost 10 times more than a decade ago. Some produce as many as 40-60 every year (Dyson’s lifetime total is a mere 50). These appear in so-called international journals with high-impact factors, are well-cited, and seeming fulfil all requirements of high quality. The authors rake in cash prizes, national awards, and the Higher Education Commission (HEC) screams about the post-2002 ‘revolution’ at every opportunity.

But the truth forlornly begs to be heard: there is no actual research behind most of these so-called research papers. The internet has placed at an author’s fingertip vast amounts of literature from which to freely cut and paste, invent data, and plagiarise ideas. Although software checks like Turn-It-In exist, they are next to useless. True, the ideal journal referee is supposed to be a know-all. But in fact he is too hard-pressed to check everything, or may even be complicit. Publishing in fly-by-night journals, or arranging for your paper to be cited, is now a finely developed art form.

Crime in Pakistani academia has overtaken even the legendary bribery of our police departments or the easy corruption of income tax authorities. But dealing with academic heist, now organised and systematised, won’t be easy. Here’s why.

First, knowledge is increasingly specialised and to detect cheating isn’t easy. A molecular biologist might not fairly judge the work of an ethologist, or a plasma physicist that of a string theorist. In principle any academic community must police itself rather than be policed from outside. But the small number of genuine academics in Pakistan means that there are precious few policemen.

Second, a thoughtless government policy that pays by the number of research papers and PhD’s produced allows cheats to get rich. Unable to tell good from bad, the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology actively encourages our professors to pillage public property.

The same dynamics applies to PhD production. The basic subject knowledge of PhD candidates is rarely tested and, if ever, only perfunctorily. Although the referees of a candidate’s thesis are supposed to be impartial, they are often chosen by a supervisor for being cooperative. Of course, the reports can be appropriately doctored when necessary.

Most PhD supervisors never get caught while doctoring. But if by rare chance someone does, he gets little more than a tap on the wrist. A colleague, a former professor of biology at Quaid-i-Azam University, then also the dean, was caught red-handed while faking referee reports for his PhD students. He admitted guilt but was not terminated and retained all retirement benefits. The administration and other colleagues shrugged off the incident; why be strict to one of your own kind? The man moved on to become dean at another university, and then emerged yet again as vice chancellor at still another university.

This ‘kindness’ has put the cancer of corruption into metastasis. Arresting further growth will require a harsh chemotherapy regime. As the very first step, rewarding authors of research papers with cash should be stopped. PCST, as well as other government organisations deliberately fuelling academic corruption, should be closed down and their directors charge-sheeted.

Transparency should be non-negotiable. While it cannot end abuse, it can discourage. So, before the author of a research paper gets any kind of credit, such as for promotion, he must give a presentation that anyone can freely attend. This should be video-recorded and archived for open access on HEC’s website. Whereas HEC’s present chairman privately agreed to my suggestion nearly two years ago, and then publicly on television a year later, I see no signs of implementation.

Still more radical therapy may be needed. As with a driving licence, all PhD degrees (including my own) should be de-recognised every 10 years, and re-recognised only after passing a literacy test in that particular discipline. Administered by some trustable overseas organisation, the written test should be at the level of an undergraduate examination equivalent to that taken by students after their first year of studies at a good foreign university. Will this reduce our current PhD population by 50 per cent? Eighty per cent?

No country becomes wealthy by printing a mountain of paper currency. And no university system becomes better by dishing out substandard PhD degrees, or by accepting vacuous research papers as valid. Instead, the way forward lies in adhering to strict ethical standards, cultivating excellence, rejecting mediocrity, and nurturing a spirit of inquiry and intellectual excitement.

Misjudging universities

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Daen

THE headlines earlier this week were celebratory: a Pakistani university has been included in the “500 Best Global Universities” by the US News and World Report. Although Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU) in Islamabad occupied only the 496th place — well below 10 other universities from neighbouring India and Iran — this is welcome news. Have we actually zoomed up and away from the rock-bottom standards of our higher education?

Sadly, the flawed methodology used by the Report means that this happy conclusion cannot be affirmed or denied. If used to assess universities in the United States and Europe the approach, though controversial, has some degree of validity. But, applied to developing countries like Pakistan, Iran, and India, it can lead to absurd conclusions.

Take, for example, the inclusion of QAU but the absence of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) from the top 500 list. QAU is a rather ordinary Pakistani public-sector university where I have taught for 41 years, and where I still continue to teach voluntarily. I have much affection for it. LUMS, on the other hand, is a private university for Pakistan’s pampered super-elite with much greater resources, financial and intellectual. I do not have the same positive feelings for LUMS, where my two years of teaching ended mysteriously and unpleasantly. So, whereas I wish it were the other way around, honesty compels me to say that LUMS is superior as a university to QAU. Those familiar with both institutions will surely agree.

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The rot can be stemmed if the HEC and PCST agree to reverse policies that incentivise corruption.

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Just what have the Report’s editors been smoking? According to its website, the Report judges a university by the quantity of research produced. More precisely, 65pc of the grade comes from counting the number of PhDs produced, papers published, and citations earned. Another 25pc is for an (undefined and undefinable) “research reputation”, while the remaining 10pc is for “international collaborations”. This recipe is not unreasonable. After all, publishing research articles in good journals and counting citations is important in assessing individual and institutional academic achievement. Having PhD students undoubtedly helps generate a culture of research.

But there’s a catch. Social scientists call it Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” This law is nearly as ironclad as one of physics. A corollary: robust systems may suffer some distortion but weaker ones can be willfully deformed and massively manipulated by prevailing local interests.

Pakistan’s academic system is, as everyone agrees, far from robust. An estimated 40pc of students cheat in matriculation, intermediate, and college examinations. Teachers are no more ethical than shopkeepers, policemen, politicians, judges, and generals. Because of policies that reward authors of research articles and PhD supervisors with cash and promotions, our universities have turned into factories producing junk papers and PhDs. Publishing papers is now a well-developed art form that combines outright plagiarism, faking data, showcasing trivia, repeating old papers, and using fly-by-night journals. With apologies to the few genuine students and their supervisors, the fact is that PhDs are awarded to all and sundry.

From many grotesque examples, I will repeat one that I had argued out fruitlessly for many months with Dr Javed Leghari, who became the Higher Education Commission (HEC) chairman following Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, the principal architect of the numbers game.

This concerned a physics PhD thesis that was guided by an “HEC meritorious professor” at Balochistan University, co-supervised by the then vice-chancellor of Quaid-i-Azam University, Dr Masoom Yasinzai. The thesis title was A quantitative study on chromotherapy. The text contained equations that apparently bestowed respectability. Together with several notable Pakistani physicists, I saw this as nonsense. But months of effort failed to convince Dr Leghari, who refused to reveal the names of the referees.

As a last-ditch effort, I sent a copy to two distinguished physicists who I knew for many years. One was the physics Nobel Prize (1979) winner, Steven Weinberg, and the other was the physics Nobel Prize (1988) winner, Jack Steinberger.

Weinberg wrote a point by point criticism which ended up saying: “I am appalled by what I have seen. The thesis shows a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of physics. This thesis is not only unworthy of a PhD, it is positively dangerous, since it might lead patients with severe illnesses to rely on ‘chromotherapy’ rather than on scientific medicine. I find it difficult to understand how this thesis could have earned its author any academic degree.”

Steinberger was equally negative: “a reasonable physics department should not have accepted anything like this work … Following world news this past decade, I have been very unhappy about the Pakistani political instability and social problems, but I had imagined that its cultural level was better than what I now see.”

This rot can be stemmed if the HEC and Pakistan Council for Science & Technology agree to reverse policies that incentivise corruption. This will not be easy. Resisting pressures from greedy beneficiaries of the present system will require enormous moral strength, especially now that the Report has demonstrated the rewards for wholesale publishing.

My last meeting with the current HEC chairman, Dr Mukhtar Ahmad, was a surprisingly pleasant one. He expressed concern at the decay within and seemed receptive to the following suggestion: “Let the HEC require that an author of a research paper, for which he or she desires official credit, to give a video-recorded presentation before the institution’s faculty. This would be archived for free access on the HEC website.”

All necessary technologies needed to implement the above are already in place. The benefits would be two-fold. First, any piece of genuinely important research would become widely known. Second, fake research and corrupt practices would be readily spotted.

Many months have passed since our meeting. Although my emails requesting signs of progress remain unanswered, I remain hopeful that the honourable chairman’s reply is somewhere out there in cyberspace.

The writer teaches physics and mathematics in Lahore and Islamabad.

Are Footballers cleverer than PhD students? Think again

Ability is dictated by what we need to succeed. A chimp would fare better than me in a jungle – that doesn't make it smarter

• Dean Burnett
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 February 2013 17.12 GMT

'How can a test accurately measure something when there is no certainty as to what is being measured?' Photograph: Nick Potts/PA

A recent study has shown that footballers can perform better than PhD students on certain cognitive tasks. This is being interpreted in the mainstream media as evidence that footballers are smarter than PhD students. While this is something of a considerable extrapolation, it is a perfect example of how our views and ideas about what counts as "intelligence" are a lot more flexible than most would think.

Scientifically, there is no real consensus per se on what intelligence can be accurately defined as. IQ tests may seem like an obvious way to assess intelligence, but in psychology their use remains controversial. How can a test accurately measure something when there is no certainty as to what is being measured? When you've got demonstrating that intelligence is dependent on working memory capacity, or arguing whether it's supported by singular or multiple processes, you need to be reasonably intelligent to keep up with the varying theories about what that even means.

Intelligence is also strongly influenced by culture. What's considered smart in one culture could well be considered foolish in another. We are all guilty of this bias to some extent. In the UK, a detailed knowledge of science is considered intelligent by many, whereas a detailed knowledge of football usually isn't. But there's nothing to say someone's football knowledge isn't just as or more complex and diverse than someone's knowledge of science. But football is everywhere, you don't need a degree to know about it, children play it all the time – so an in-depth knowledge of it is, perhaps unfairly, not considered an achievement.

Of course, knowing a lot of detailed information about something is only part of intelligence. It's also important to consider how this information is used. This division is referred to by some as crystallised and fluid intelligence, or information you retain and your ability to use it, respectively. Think of it like a computer: you've got your hard drive (data storage) and your processor (data usage); you need both to create a truly useful device.

This is reflected in changes to the structure of the brain, as the brain adapts and dedicates more resources to this constantly occurring demand. Therefore, it shouldn't be surprising that professional footballers would be better at certain mental abilities than non-footballers.

Whatever you think of the sport, a professional football match is undoubtedly a challenging context to be in. With so many variables to consider in a constantly changing scenario, it would be hard enough to keep on top of without thousands of people screaming at you for various reasons. Footballers have to be able to do this if they wish to get to the top of their field, so of course they'd perform better in tests that assess rapid thinking, attention and any other ability that isn't so crucial for other disciplines.

Footballers are stereotyped as being a bit thick, based on their unrefined behaviour and lack of social/cultural awareness. But these things haven't exactly held them back, so why would they have learned otherwise? Our abilities and skills are largely dictated by what we need to do in order to succeed. A chimpanzee would be far better equipped than I to survive in the jungle and would undoubtedly perform better than me in tests that assessed this. Still, I wouldn't let one fill in my tax return.

Perhaps intelligence is the wrong term to use, perhaps it would be fairer to say footballers and PhD students have differing mental abilities. But which of these abilities is considered "intelligent" seems to be a lot more subjective than most people realise.