The University of Gujrat (UOG) reflects the government’s approach to make the fruits of higher learning available to maximum people, including those living in rural areas of the country. Therefore, it can play a key role in harnessing the local potential that would provide the most needed skills required for modernizing the industry in Gujrat and adjoining areas. Once industrial units manufacturing different kinds of products of light engineering and a host of other varieties have the services of qualified managerial and technical staff, they would be able to attract local as well as foreign markets easily, thus reducing the country’s import bill and bringing in more foreign exchange.
The University, in close collaboration with the Higher Education Commission (HEC), is already in touch with foreign institutions from where it could acquire the services of qualified teachers of different subjects.
Promoting higher education in Pakistan, where the literacy rate is low and the quality of education poor, is a daunting task. Universities today are not judged just by their ability to transfer knowledge, but by their capacity to create new knowledge. They are measured by high quality PhD output; patents that are commercialized based on the work carried out in them; honors and awards won by the faculty at the international level; citations of the work of the faculty in the Science Citation Index; impact of the journals in which the work of the faculty is published; and international grants won by the faculty.
These and other such measures that reflect the creativity of the faculty and students of the university determine its academic stature. The management of UOG will also have to use similar yardsticks to measure its performance, so that it could emerge as a genuinely high quality institution of learning.