And Dr. Shahid Hussain Bokhari Quits… 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…