Research and HEC-approved Urdu journals.

Byline: Rauf Parekh

ABOUT a decade and a half ago, Higher Education Commission (HEC) made it mandatory for university teachers to get a PhD in the relevant field to qualify for promotion to the next higher cadre. Also, an MPhil degree is now given more leverage during the vetting process for appointments at colleges.

Both the moves seem quite sensible as they aim for promoting research activities and producing better quality teachers to teach at higher levels. But this has had some after-effects, too: students seeking admissions to MPhil and PhD degree programmes have flooded government-run universities which are already bursting at the seams.

In other words, they see research as a ladder to higher echelons in society, not an objective in itself. Now the sole purpose of getting a higher degree, in many cases, is getting appointed or promoted at a university. Once this purpose is achieved, the so-called research scholars give up even reading, let alone researching and writing.

Since this writer has had the honour of serving as a professor at the Urdu department of a university and had been editor of an HEC-approved Urdu research journal as well as serving on peer reviewers' panels of some of these journals, some suggestions regarding Urdu research journals may be helpful, both for HEC and researchers of Urdu. Since I am not much aware of the status of research in other disciplines, I would restrict my submissions to Urdu.

Another good move by HEC that has had some side-effects and needs to be reviewed is the precondition of getting at least 15 research articles published in HEC-approved research journals for becoming a professor in PBS-21.This writer has been helplessly watching, with a heavy heart, the falling standards of research work and Urdu research journals. What is more worrying is the fact that HEC-approved Urdu research journals, published mostly by universities, have played at least some role in this fall. It seems that now most of the lecturers, assistant professors and associate professors teaching at universities have made it their ultimate goal in life to get published 15 research papers in HEC-approved Urdu research journals, conveniently forgetting what the real purpose of research is and what methodologies and techniques of research are there. What they do is: they choose a topic, any topic, without giving it much thought, and write whatever they feel like. At the end they realise it does not have any footnotes or...