DISAPPOINTING - DISTRESSING - DISGUSTING - HUMILATING. These are the words to show disappointment with the advertisement published by the Higher Education Commission. The advertisement is against the professed spirit of hiring professionals on high remuneration to improve research and education standard in Pakistan. One can understand that Pakistanis might face discrimination in foreign nations but to see this happen in one's own country, and that too as a part of official policy, is disturbing. The HEC's approach is discriminatory and irrational and sends a very wrong message to qualified people with foreign degrees looking for suitable jobs in academia in Pakistan.

Reports are that the department of Higher Education Commission has made a decision to pay US$ 3000 per month to hire professionals from overseas. Dr S. Naqvi, member, HRD & Strategic Planning, Higher Education Commission, in his letter to the editor in the Dawn argues that the focus of this program was hiring of expatriate Pakistani professors, who would otherwise be unwilling to return to Pakistan. Ironically, the department does not carry the any sympathetic consideration for Pakistani professionals residing in Pakistan and holding Pakistani nationality, which is evident from the advertisement recently published in the daily Dawn dated 02.11.03. The department advertised 10 positions for the retired active researchers/university teachers holding PH.D degrees against the salary of Rs.25,000 per month (all inclusive). The advertisement states about the qualification of the candidates, “the scholars shall be engaged on the basis of total years of their experience and active research in university/ degree awarding institution/research organization/industry as well as quality and number of their internationally referred journal publications, conferences presentations, report publications and number of PH.D, M.S graduates produced in addition to their record of writing research proposals and fund raising at national and international levels.” The required qualification in the advertisement by all standards is very high which can be wished by any good higher education or research institution but the offered salary is not. Offering salary of Rs.25000 to a qualified professional of this caliber shows department non-seriousness to the cause of improving research efforts in Pakistan. 

It is illogical as to why a qualified professional should be offered such a low salary if s/he has achieved the high standard of excellence while working in Pakistan. Should we consider it a mistake of those who obtained degrees from abroad but chose to work in Pakistan? Mockingly, we demand hard work and more patriotism for meager extrinsic rewards from those Pakistani professionals who did not settle down in the developed world and came back to their homeland but prepared to pay heavily to ex-Pakistanis (or non-Pakistanis) who preferred to settle down in the West Europe or North America.  

The department in concern seems to be disinterested in recommending or offering improved salary structure for professionals who are already associated with the education field in Pakistan but willing to launch a 3.2 billion dollars futile scheme for hiring foreign faculty. Agreeing with other commentators on the issue, I expressed my views in my previous article that sparkling-looking initiative of hiring people from abroad is not addressing the core issues of our academia. It may be plausible to argue here that this hiring policy signals that decision making process more or less has followed a Garbage-can model. Without going into the details of the model, it indicates that decisions are made on ad-hoc basis without considering long term consequences.

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The calculated assumption of the writer is that the Higher Education Commission may not be able to recruit real highly qualified people even after offering salary of US$3000. One of the reasons is that this offer might be very lucrative from Pakistani standard but not from the standard of the West Europe and North America. The writer has contacted a few senior teaching staff of West European universities and asked them if they would consider US$3000 per month as an attractive salary. Regrettably, none of them rated it as an attractive bid to move to a country like Pakistan. So it is quite likely that the department might end up with hiring new starters (fresh PH.Ds), mediocre professionals or opportunists who would not perform and go back to their homelands by blaming the infra-structure of Pakistani education system.

In short, the discriminatory and unfair hiring policy will not pay off instead creates a competitive and hostile environment carrying ‘you’ and ‘us’ phenomenon. And, such an environment will neither be conducive nor motivating for work. Consequently, the scheme might not bring the desired results for which this amount is allocated. So, the government should reevaluate the goals that it wants to achieve by spending such huge amount. The writer suggestion is that this amount should be spend in improving existing infra structure and increasing salary of the teaching staff working in higher education institutions.