Gata Ja'aye Banjaraa: How greed ruins academia By Pervez Hoodbhoy

Last month, at a formal meeting, QAU professors voted to make life easy for themselves. The Academic Council, the key decision-making body of the university, decided that henceforth no applicant for a university teaching position, whether at the associate professor or professor level, could be required to give an open seminar or lecture as a part of the selection process. Open lectures were deemed by the council as illegal, unjust and a ploy for victimising teachers.

This is mind-boggling. Public presentations allow an applicant’s subject competence and ability to communicate to be assessed by the academic community. (For the record, this writer insisted that requiring open lectures from candidates is standard practice in every decent university in the world. This prompted angry demands for his dismissal as chairman of his department!)A second major decision also dealt a stunning blow to the future of QAU. The council voted 25-12 that QAU’s PhD candidates did not have to conform to international standards. It decided to overturn its earlier acceptance of the HEC’s requirement that the international GRE subject tests must be passed by a candidate prior to awarding a PhD degree. Some professors gleefully noted that the HEC had been mortally weakened by the removal of its chairman, Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, and argued that good advantage needed to be taken of this happy fact. Those who wanted international testing were labelled agents of foreign powers.