The Directorates of Research & Quality: An exercise in futility

The Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, while it has taken many great initiatives, has also created havoc by requiring all institutions of higher education to create, manage and follow the dictates of "quality enhancement cells." 

The idea of quality management comes from industry and is arguably suited to the needs of manufacturing/services industries. Higher Education, however, is another ball game. Unfortunately there are some countries in the Western world such as UK who have fallen pray to this quality assurance idea thanks to the New labor and now conservatives granting their cronies millions of pounds in consultancy fees to enhance "quality".

At the heart of an educational institution are its faculty and students. It is the quality of teaching and learning that must be ensured. In order to accomplish this goal, we need to invest in the faculty and give them exposure to knowledge, research and provide them with necessary resources. 

What is happening in the guise of quality enhancement is a barrage of paper work for which the teachers are neither equipped nor compensated. If the exercise had any real value, these factors could have been ignored. But the point is that making every department count the number of slides shown by its faculty in the classroom can hardly contribute to quality. One exception was a former colleague of mine at GCU who really cared about faculty development. But this was an exception and not the rule.

But the paper pushers in HEC are not content with that. They have instructed universities to set up directorates of research  and innovation. The tragedy is that the directors of most of these bodies are old and retired, if not purely bureaucratic minded, professors who would have difficulty spelling the word "innovation" if not pronouncing it. (I remember a dean of faculty at GCU who pronounced faculty as fuckality.)

The Director research at GCU Lahore, for instance, has succeeded in delaying the process of research by several months. One wonders why he has created such tedious policies and procedures. The end result of this mind blowing red tape is that fewer research articles are being produced in any given year in every department.

These white elephants of quality and research management directorates should be eliminated and instead we should invest in the training and well being of the faculty. If we treat them like fuckality, it would continue to be an exercise in futility.