And Dr. Shahid Hussain Bokhari Quits…

it is reported in daily dawn:

The question is, do we need the army or is it the other way around? Mr Kamran is right that Pakistan is paying to keep our army.

The army in turn has conquered Pakistan four times. Gone are the days when the melodies of Noorjehan could be heard from every teashop or most trucks on their tail boards displayed ‘Pak Fauj ko salaam’.

Before the present conquest of Pakistan by the army we had almost run out of enemies. We enjoyed the best of relations with the Taliban in Kabul while Russia was thousands of miles away.

We had little cause to fear an attack from Iran or China, and with the recently-acquired nuclear weapons India was fairly neutralised. But with the army back in command, we seem to be surrounded by enemies on our east and west.

Do we need the army in such circumstances? Can the army provide security to the nation? These are open questions. Yes, defence of the country we do need.

An alternative could be a general draft system. Under this, all able-bodied male Pakistanis between the ages of 18 and 25 years may be required to put in one year of compulsory military service.

This will not only economise the defence bill but will also bring about closeness between the civil and military sections of society and perhaps end the seemingly never-ending cycle of military rule after every few years.


I think a valid suggestion... but it should also give option to women as well in the 18-25 category.

I believe we must start working for a better future- a future where we have a system based of justice, merit and fairplay.

Pray for our country and pray for the betterment of humanity.

I hope tomorrows world will be a better place to live in.

How long is it going to take before we realize they problems ``our`` army has been causing aour country. When will we realize that our real power is not these real estate agents (army is the largest property mafia in the country) but our people. We lost half our country due to machinations by these cowards who first prosecuted unarmed civilians in east Pakistan and then shamelessly surrendered to the Indians. Our eastern brothers made the mistake of not recognizing the real menace, the army and wrongly blamed the people of the western half for their sufferings. look at what they are doing in Baluchistan, killing people who dared to demand justice for a lady doctor. Look what they did in Punjab, after forcibly occupying their land, they butchered helpless farmers in Okara for demanding the right of ownership to the land they tilled for centuries. The east Pakistanis should have taken the rest along instead of going their own way, being in majority. They owe an apology to the rest of the Pakistanis for this.

Incidently, it is not the politicians who are the most corrupt, but these men in khaki outfit. The shady defence deals and the kickbacks received by generals is huge as comared to what the politicians would ever dream of; not to mention the legal corruption in the form of loads of plots, agrarin land, heavily discounted airline and railways tickets.

Lets hope awareness is crated among the masses and we can truely turn our country into a prosperous nation by doing away with the fauji and beaurocratic culture.

Resignation of Dr.Bukhari tentamounts to the orphanage of EE department. A week ago I came upto a conclusion that only those nations will exist as nations in the coming centuries which would possess and continue to create new knowledge. Even if our economic growth reaches double digits. no sustainable development is possible without knowledge. Knowledge, in modern days, is a product of research. Research is done by researchers. Even so called ``mediocre`` researchers are a national asset as compared to those whose ``superb brain power`` can be purchased by a Western firm funding research at MITs, Stanfords etc( I respect all these institutions from the core of my heart for having done so much for humanity as a whole, but my line of argument in this response is different). One day our mediocre,super and supreme researchers will try to come back to make Pakistan a production factory of genuine knowledge. Dr Shahid Bukhari was a `son of the soil`, who has served his country with all his possible zeal, zest, energy, potential. He has put in his `best` in UET. This is what matters. This country needs its sons playing on its soil. Whats the use of a `desi superman` serving uncle sam and his cousins.
Dr. Bukhari has played his innings for his country. An innings which has made a real difference. Other players need to add to grand total. I am sure Dr.Bukhari is retired hurt. He will resume his innings for his country whenever country needs him. Yes, some people say that Dr was stubborn etc, then what? Jinnah was also stubborn. Great peoople need to be stubborn, overtly or covertly. My salutes to the real ``Comrade`` of our times. Proud to be his student from 1990 to 1995.

Re: # 88

1) He was lucky to have published some papers in the early days of parallel computing. That is the only reason he is with ISI index of mostly cited authors. Most of the ISI awardees are the ones who do not represent the true researchers. Is Do Knuth among the most cited authors?

OK, I agree. So it means that he was among the founders of parallel computing. Do you think, it is a symbol of bad researcher to be able to write a paper in early days of a research domain which proves to be the classic work later?

2) Honestly speaking Dr Bokhari is a person of mediocre intellect. I my self am one of the sort. I have done a couple of MSs and a doctorate from MIT and am an associate professor. I have been an outstanding debater as I was in Pakistan. That is why I can understand the position Dr Bokhari enjoys.

It is too harsh to say him someone of mediocre intellect. He has been on editorial boards of many IEEE journals and he is an IEEE and ACM fellow. I don’t claim him to be Abdus Salam or anyone similar, but calling him a mediocre is not justified. And do tell me, how many researchers like him are there in Pakistan?


I agree MIT, Harvard, Stanford might have a high intellectual concentration and hence you have developed higher standards for looking at the researchers, But it doesn’t mean that a teacher who was really loved by his students back in university, you try to prove that nothing changed if he left the university.

When this military General was appointed head of UET, there were 15 PhDs in EE. Now there are 10. And the best ones have left the department because of conflicts with the real “mediocre Jernail”. Then the General talks of revolutionary ideas of bulk enrolment of PhDs in UET so that batches of “scholars” could come out of UET. I mean, how a person can think of promoting research in a “Fauji Way”. If I was a PhD, I might have never worked under this type of person being the administrator of UET.

3) Socially he is an isolated person. He does not agree with any of his colleagues or students in any important point. He has created that aura of being a superior person over the years. No one can agree with rungBaz when he says that Dr Bokhari will live in the hearts of students. He has never been a popular teacher. In fact I myself am of the same sort. I have good relations with my American friends but my Pakistani class fellows from the past will testify that my behavior was unbearable to them. Success has its price.


Wrong. He taught 98 session for whole 4 years. I invite you to contact anyone from 98 session. Everyone considers him the best teacher ever. I don’t know about your sessions, but my session mates have a very positive image of him. And most of us really respect him.

4) His special subject was elements of Boolean algebra. To be honest one does not have to be Einstein to understand that subject. The other area of his teaching was digital computing fundamentals. Again, it is quite a straightforward thing.


Sir, with due respect, it was a very naïve comment from an MIT scholar if you were talking from a perspective to his research skills. Whatever was proposed by Newton looks very simple and straightforward. But it was not before him. There was no concept of Boolean Algebra , may be, before Alan Turing. And there was no parallel processing before 70s. As some good brains worked well and laid the foundations of the knowledge by simplifying the rules, these subject seem to be very “simple” now.



When it comes to teaching, I don’t know if he taught you digital logic design or what? Fore our session, he taught us Algorithms, OO Programming, Networks and Operating Systems. And we found him good enough in all these subjects.



5) He had to teach communication systems at undergrad level once and one could see that the ‘mostly cited author’ was always groping in the dark and had to explain every time that it was not his subject.



Come on. Don’t be so much biased. “highly cited researcher” doesn’t mean good at gardening, cooking and bodybuilding. If he is bad at communication systems, it really doesn’t matter a lot as he is good at his own subject.



6) In his letter of resignation most of the points are self contradictory. If he had to leave for some better opportunity or if he had the feeling that his decision to go back to Pakistan was wrong, he should have resigned quietly without much ado.



I agree, he is very bad a communication skills. That’s why I think that he is only a good researcher, not a good administrator or RangBaaz like “Azhar Shah” as is the common opinion of current UETians.



Researcher need to be dealt properly. It is important not to hurt their egos. What happened at UET that while all professors, in their off the record discussions, talk against Tenure Track System, but when Dr Bokhari protested against it publicly, he was issued a notice in which he was declared “arrogant”. And look, who issues the notice. A retired military officer who has no idea what does it mean by running a university and dealing with the researchers.

7) I am sure no one will miss him at UET.

Sir, your session might have bad memories with him. But We, 98-EE students respect him a lot. And we will miss him. If I join UET after my PhD, I will certainly miss him. Others reserve the right not to miss him.

Just wanted to say that don’t generalize your experience to rest of UETians.

8) It has never been teachers who primarily contributed to the quality of education at UET. Only the best students could get admission to UET and that was the reason why UETians are supposed to be better engineers. Take the example of Molwi Saleem. He is not proclaimed to be an intelligent person. Still he has contributed at least as much to the university as Dr Bokhari may claim to have done.

I disagree. I respect Mowlvi Saleem Sahib for his kind attitude towards students. But Bokhari has been a key force behind establishment of labs and upgrading the courses. Our first computer lab was funded by Syed Maratib Ali Trust for which Bokhari had to arrange money. And it happened before gloomy post-HEC era.

Saleem sahib is a cool guy but not really active enough to contribute more than Dr Bokhari.

9) Most of the students will agree that in most respects Molvi Khalid Mahmood ul Hasan or Masood are much better and dedicated teachers. Dr Noor is much more pragmatic despite being the most intelligent person around.

Again it is your personal observation. I don’t agree with it. Noor Sahib literally recites the lecture which makes students feel sleepy. Masood Sahib doesn’t care if students are understanding his lecture or no. I didn’t study from khalid Mehmood sahib.

10) It is a sad fact that the university is regulated by a General and not by an academician. That is the only point why one would like to resign from UET. If that was his reason he should have mentioned it straight as he claims to be a straight forward person.

Atlast, we partially agree on a point.

Thanks for the comments. I am happy that a lot of people took notice of our campaign (mainly 97/98 session) to raise our concerns and we managed to get attention from some of national newspapers and HEC officials. Important thing for us was that while HEC is claiming to have achieved a lot during last 7 years, we needed to tell them that university professors were not really happy for what was happening.




Regards,

After having gone through the article and the 87 responses I would like to add a couple of points not yet discussed here. I have had a chance to be his student.

1) He was lucky to have published some papers in the early days of parallel computing. That is the only reason he is with ISI index of mostly cited authors.

2) Intellectually Dr Bokhari is a mediocre person. Most of his old students would testify that fact.

3) Socially he is an isolated person. He does not agree with any of his colleagues or students in any important point. He has created that aura of being a superior person over the years. No one can agree with rungBaz when he says that Dr Bokhari will live in the hearts of students. He has never been a popular teacher.

4) His special subject was elements of Boolean algebra. To be honest one does not have to be Einstein to understand that subject. The other area of his teaching was digital computing fundamentals. Again, it is quite a straightforward thing.

5) He had to teach communication systems at undergrad level once and one could see that the ‘mostly cited author’ was always groping in the dark and had to explain every time that it was not his subject.

6) In his letter of resignation most of the points are self contradictory. If he had to leave for some better opportunity or if he had the feeling that his decision to go back to Pakistan was wrong, he should have resigned quietly without much ado.

7) I am sure no one will miss him at UET.

8) It has never been teachers who primarily contributed to the quality of education at UET. Only the best students could get admission to UET and that was the reason why UETians are supposed to be better engineers. Take the example of Molwi Saleem. He is not proclaimed to be an intelligent person. Still he has contributed at least as much to the university as Dr Bokhari may claim to have done.

9) Most of the students will agree that in most respects Molvi Khalid Mahmood ul Hasan or Masood are much better teachers.

10) It is a sad fact that the university is regulated by a General and not by an academician. That is the only point why one would like to resign from UET. If that was his reason he should have mentioned it straight as he claims to be a straight forward person.

I am Tauseef Aized, also a faculty member at UET. At the moment doing research in Japan.
I have read the letter written by Dr. Bukhari to HEC. I have had the opportunity to listen to Dr. Bukhari in the University during some meetings. He is a good speaker and writer. There is no doubt he is the most brillant Faculty member at UET, alas we have lost him. But honestly speaking, his letter did not substantiate the issues.

1. He says that Basic Sciences Programs should not be started at all, but no proper reasoning is there, why not that? The reason could be that this institution was primarliy built for Eng. studies and all the resources should be devoted to that. But he says that the good standard can not be achieved? Why that can not be achieved. If it is poor right now, Dr. Bukhari must ponder over the issue how that can be improved.

2. The shoratge of faculty members is a justified point in his letter, as we all have to devote all the time to teach and do not have enough time to concentrate on research.

3. I am not a over enthusiastic person, but even if people like him just run away from the scenes, how the things can be put on the right track. Why not to struggle more and more to put the things right on the track. He is a great man and no great man in his life is avoiding difficult situations.

I would not have written all these, if he is just an ordinary faculty member, he is a man of conviction, he must not run away. Also, Dr. Sb. hitting the targets require a composed behaviour and emotional ways can never do something good. I hope you wo`not minfd this.

Being new to the forum and not having read the 85 comments on this issue, I apologize if anything I say here was said before.

Reading Dr. Bokhari’s letter and also going through his profile on the ISI website:
(http://hcr3.isiknowledge.com/author.cgi?&link1=Browse&link2=Results&id=1644), there is no doubt about the man’s academic accomplishments in both research and from what I hear… in teaching as well. Being an academic myself, I’m proud to have gotten to know someone from Pakistan of his research calibre.

Having said that, I fail to understand his criticisms nonetheless. On the one hand, he finds fault with the current conditions of training facilities at the institution, while on the other, he also counters the establishment of a research chair.

Coming from academia myself, I know that one of the primary purposes of establishing a research chair through a sponsorship is to attract more corporate and govt. investment in the institution. Typically, these chairs earn more than double the salary of a tenured professor, and the reasons are simple: they are taking upon themselves, more burden in the form of:
i) engaging in ground-breaking research initiatives,
ii) day-to-day administration of the department, the faculty and the students, and
iii) campaigning for more investments… both monetary, and in-kind, from other corporate, govt. and educational institutions.

Chairs are common practice in most Universities around the world, and having worked in tight collaboration with two chairs in my dept., I can kind of relate to their work – both their toils and their yields.

Secondly, I don’t see how the institution of pure disciplines such as Mathematics & Sciences can directly correlate with poor performance in research… if anything, the University can institutionalize this by allowing those who excel at teaching to take care of these areas while allowing for researchers to concentrate more on their work. Along these lines, the new source of income can be distributed to pay nominal and premium wages to teaching staff and research staff respectively. So he wants better facilities… which can be installed by additional funds from new programs... he also wants better research provisions… which can also be had from expansion and restructuring of teaching tasks… why then is he against expansion?

Somewhat related to the point above, I don’t quite understand his concern over “tenure-track” – a system which to me symbolizes exactly what Dr. Bokhari wants… i.e. the academic freedom that allows teachers to openly disagree with authorities without fearing negative consequences such as being dismissed. In the realm intellectual pursuits, you can expect people to produce higher quality research output when they have job security – with the autonomy of a tenured position, academics are able to pursue their own research interests with more and produce better results. I think Dr. Bokhari has outlined these two points Re: research excellence and freedom of speech, but why then is he against the TT system.

Just some thoughts…

I am one of his old students. What the commentators are saying here is quite refreshing to hear, because they do not know him. I do not intend to initiate another argument with Kulharee or someone else. I think this Kulharee is a teenager who knows next to nothing about how hard is it to find an able university teacher let alone someone with the capabilities of Professor Bokhari. Any way every one has a right to say whatever they want to. And, in fact, some of the points raised by Kulharee despite some weird concoction are really valid arguments.

Let me add a few points.
1) The letter published here is not the ‘letter of resignation’. I understand it to be a letter explaining his reluctance to argue with HEC any further.
2) He is one of the ablest people around. For me he was always a good teacher and a very fair examiner.
3) I think he does have a right to interfere with the policy matters regarding education.
4) I do not think his resignation will change anything. He has done a fine job for over 25 years. It did not have to end in such a bitter way.
5) Maybe someone of you may appreciate that if one has been doing his job as selflessly as Professor Bokhari, his does deserve to be heeded.
6) Dr Naqvi and Prof. Attaur Rahman & Co (of HEC) may be good in their intentions. But it is an open fact that their policies are more of ad hoc nature without much coherence. The foreign faculty hiring program and “tenure track system” (Please note that this terminology does not coincide with its usual US use) are some examples of it.
7) What Professor Bokhari seems to suggest is something more effective, lasting and contributive to sustainable development of the education sector. I mean you can not achieve much by hiring a foreign professor for a couple of years. He will be getting 7-10 times the pay of the already serving professors. I think a much better and effective approach would be to increase the pay and benefits of existing professors and lecturers in addition to hiring foreign professors. In that case the there will be no need to introduce the so called ‘tenure track’. HEC is awarding scholarships to junior teachers to get a doctoral education abroad, who will be coming by the end of next year to continue their teaching jobs.
And at the end I wish Professor Bokhari all the best for his future endeavors. I know how it feels when you have given the best years of your life to such a noble cause and all of a sudden it ends up in such a mess. Anyway, there will be lots of research opportunities for you, Dr Bokhari! And your 25 years has not been vain. You will keep on living in the hearts of thousands of your students like me. We old UETians ‘have to’ talk about you and Dr QUA Khan whenever we remember our times at UET.

Re: # 79

OK Irfan, Mail sent to you. I am impressed by GIKI Alumni Association. They seem to have a good say in university matters.

And Zahra, Thanks for the kind words of wisdom. I agree with your analysis.

And Kulhari, Sada Jeetay Raho aur Bongian Maartay raho. :)

Re: # 82
Also please call me Shakeel, not java. I am ``Hafiz Shakeel Ahmad`` a simplest animal on earth.

Re: # 75

Dear Kulraree, this is in nature that a human mind changes in 5 years. You can observe your life, the things that you used to think in school life were not realistic when you were in University.

So you changed your mind with the time. The habbits are also similarly changed with the time. But you were correct in both stages of your life.

And I am sure that you will change some of you if you will get love and attention from your friends and family. If you need my friendship, I am available. I dont know much about you but only that you are exactly like I, a human.

Re: # 80

Yeah, and I was the dumb one to open a name yesterday (by the way, it was not very original)…I don’t know if you come from a long line of insecure behnchoods or you are the first in the family.. Please do let me know. Thanks.

Oye Kulharee ...you are my lost wife or what ..? as you are telling so many stories about me. After reading so many bull shits from Ustad Tabley wala ( What an economist). I would suggest to change your name
Name: Dustbin (Kachrey ka Dabba) or (Gandd ka Dabba)

Because whenever you speak ...only Gandd gets out of your mouth .....

I think all wise people on this group will agree to me.??:))))

@Charlie,
Your article got forwarded on the giki-alumni mailing list. Our alumni association president has already approached the rector of GIKI to request him to persuade the good doctor to join the GIKI EE department. Could you please ask him if he would be interested in teaching at a private university like GIKI? The GIKI EE faculty is in dire straits, and could really use a dedicated guy like him.

Acknowledge that you got this message (preferably send me an email because I don`t have your address) and we will sit down and talk when you get back to Paris.

Regards,
Irfan.

PS: Ne t`inquiète pas pour les émeutes, elles sont seulement dans les banlieues du nord. Le seul problème que tu rencontreras c`est que peut-être le RER B sera un peut tarder car il passe par ces endroits pourris.

Re: # 77

[Are you stalking me? ]

Does it matter?