Why HEC’s Foreign Faculty Hiring Plan failed

This was written in June 2003 when HEC with a fanfare started the program and spent billions of rupees.

Why HEC’s Foreign Faculty Hiring Plan may fail:

• 
  HEC and its bureaucracy is not equipped to run and monitor projects.
• HEC and not the employer organization is going to make a decision on who is to be selected and who is not.
• Similar scheme for hiring foreign IT faculty initiated by MoST under Dr. Atta ur Rahman, a couple of years ago failed to produce the desired results. Many of the hired faculty have left.
• Government universities who are going to be the beneficiaries are ill-equipped and ill-prepared for the R&D work, else the need for the PhD’s would not have arisen in the first place.
• Fund is not going to be used for creating the R&D environment. It is the work environment that produces R&D and not the remuneration of the researcher. The researcher requires proper seating and research environment to deliver.
• Assimilation and change management problem: Heavily politicized and established faculty in the public universities will ensure that the new faculty do not assimilate and do not get a chance to work.
• Discrepancy in remunerations for lateral entrants and existing faculty would create fissures for which there appears inadequate preparation.
• The policy is going to fail because the change management is not something that HEC understands. There would be resistance to change and as the experience of model university ordinance shows, HEC has no strategy for encountering the problems of assimilation.
• Government with its bureaucracy is utterly unsuited for this task.