Vice Chancellor Lahore College for Women University (LCWU) Professor Dr Bushra Mirza said that university have decided to allocate a substantial fund for research and are also looking towards the Higher Education Commission Pakistan (HEC) and other bodies for the purpose.
While talking to Business Recorder Prof Mirza said that the slashing of the HEC budget (by the government) had also affected the research expenses of the varsities. Besides, the LCWU had adopted a zero tolerance towards plagiarism, she added. She also said that university is focusing on improving the quality of ongoing programs instead of starting new programs. However, she said that we are planning to start new programs on Kala Shah Kaki Campus as we will have enough space over there so we can easily start number of programs. She further said that LCWU has re-launched three PhD programmes after removing certain shortcomings, aiming to produce quality stuff.
"Three PhD programmes in education, biotechnology and political science were suspended a couple of years ago by the Higher Education Commission for not meeting the criteria. We have worked hard to meet the criteria and re-launch these programmes. In addition, we have restored the stalled post-graduation programme in mass communication," the VC told Business Recorder.
"LCWU under the new VC has also started filling the posts advertised since 2017 in different departments. "As there was no regular appointment of my predecessors for the last five years, the process of faculty and staff hiring remained halted. Now we are hiring competent teachers as the good faculty produces good students," she said.
Prof Mirza further said the varsity had set a target to be among the best institutions of the country and for the purpose it is meeting the criteria of HEC's Quality Enhancement Cell (QEC). "We are trying to get the LCWU to be part of the CPEC consortium of universities."
While responding to question on the impact of budget cut on the university Dr Mirza said that yes it is a problem for universities but fortunately at LCWU we were able to manage this crises because the university is not relying completely on HEC budget as the varsity generate 60 percent of budget from their own sources, 10 percent is given by Punjab Government and 30 percent was provided by HEC. But still we faced problems.
She said although many other universities faced number of problems due to budget cut policy of HEC as some of them were not able to pay even their staff. Public sector universities cannot be run without government support otherwise there will be no difference between government and private universities. She also said universities have no other choice than increasing fee or increasing enrolment both cases are not suitable for students. Government should seriously think about this matter, review this and sort out.
Regarding challenges faced by the university she said that as you know that there was no permanent vice chancellor at LCWU for last four five years. When there're no permanent leadership it causes a lot of problems across the institutions these issues including administrative, faculty and students issues.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2019
Comments
Comments are closed.