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Security Fears Prompt 9 Foreign Universities to Pull
Out of Pakistan
By
Shailaja Neelakantan/NEW DELHI
Issue
cover-dated May 23, 2008
Nine foreign universities that had
agreed to set up engineering schools in Pakistan — with their
own faculties and administrators — have now decided not to do
so because they are leery of the worsening security
situation and political uncertainty in the country, a daily
newspaper in Pakistan reported, citing an unnamed spokesman
of President Pervez Musharraf.
The foreign universities’ professors
and other officials are unwilling to move to Pakistan despite
very attractive remunerations offered by the Pakistan government,
which plans to spend $4-billion on the nine projects with universities
in Austria, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and
South Korea. The foreign universities may also have changed
their minds, another newspaper said, because they are finding
it difficult to arrange for the many professors needed to staff
the new institutions, some of which Pakistan has already begun
to build.
In March Pakistan’s Higher Education
Commission refuted rumors that plans to open the universities
had been deferred or canceled, and said that they would start
classes this year, as scheduled. “Foreign faculty has also concerns
regarding the security situation in the country, but we are
constantly in contact with them, they did not refuse to land
in the country, and the project is on the track,” Sohail Naqvi,
the commission’s executive director, was quoted as saying.
In 2002 Pakistan began an ambitious
program to reform its higher-education system by setting up
the commission, which has since created programs to enroll more
students in Ph.D. programs in Pakistan and abroad, to hire foreign
faculty members, to establish new universities throughout the
country, and to collaborate with foreign partners to open engineering
schools. The reforms have been controversial.
A local newspaper this month quoted
an unnamed Ministry of Education official as saying that control
of the commission would be handed over to the education ministry,
rather than report directly to the president.
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