Continuing the ‘learning from experience’ tradition we began in the last newsletter, our lead article presents some lessons for successful institutional transformation in higher education.

Three related reasons make this the topic of choice. First, LUMS SSE is an early step within a much broader transformation of LUMS to a competitive research university. Second, it is important to understand the nature of the transformation process (to interpret the SSE’s progress), which at times will seem adequate, and at other times might appear slow and frustrating. One must understand what is natural to the institution change process and what is truly a warning sign requiring corrective action. Third, the stakeholders of the SSE are very diverse: some are experts in the change process, others are less so; some are watching change from close quarters; others from farther away; some are from the corporate world or other social institutions, others from academic environments; the SSE needs the strong support of all. That can only be achieved if all of us understand (and expect) the turmoil and chaos of the change process.


The Theory And Practice of Institutional Transformation In Higher Education
Our chosen work synthesizes lessons from a multi-year effort to understand what works, and what does not, when initiating and managing transformation in the academy. We excerpt and adapt heavily from “The theory and practice of institutional transformation in higher education”, by Alexander W. Astin and Associates, published by HERI (Higher Education Research Institute) at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) in 2001. The report builds on the work of the Kellogg Forum on Higher Education Transformation, a three-year collaborative effort between the representatives of nine research centers and institutions, for understanding as well as facilitating transformation efforts at a select set of US institutions. We think the lessons they articulate are instructive for us... (Report)

 

The First SSE Advisory Committee Meeting - July 25-26, MIT Endicott House, Boston
The first SSE Advisory Committee meeting resulted in important directional recommendations for the SSE. Some facts of the meeting and highlights of the deliberations follow.

1. Attendees

   SSE Advisory Committee	LUMS SSE	Virtual Program Development Team (VPDT)
   Hassan Ahmed (Sonus Networks)	Syed Babar Ali	Dr. Salman Ahsan
   Professor Khalid Aziz (Stanford)	Dr. Khurram Afridi	Dr. Salal Humair
   Professor John Kassakian (MIT)		Dr. Asad Naqvi
   Professor Richard Larson (MIT)		Dr. Farhan Rana
   Mir Imran (Incube Ventures)		Dr. Tauseef Salma
   Professor Robert Jaffe (MIT)   was unable to attend because of an   unavoidable scheduling conflict.		Dr. Ayman Shabra
   		Dr. Tasneem Zahir
   		Dr. Hamid Zaman
   		Dr. Bilal Zuberi

    

2. Since the meeting, Professor Stephen Berry (University of Chicago) and Mr. Zia Chishti (The Resource Group) have kindly agreed to join the SSE Advisory Committee, and the next meeting of the Advisory Committee has been tentatively planned for Pakistan in Feb 2006.
    
3. The meeting agenda centered on topics of foremost concern to us (and on which constructive deliberations were possible within 2 working days): the vision of the SSE; the role of the Advisory Committee; faculty recruitment and retention; school, department and lab structures; sustainable financial models; and recruiting a Dean for the SSE.
    

4. We briefly mention some major Advisory Committee recommendations since details are difficult to present here. These concern the vision of the school, the recruitment of the faculty, and the departmental structure of the school. All recommendations were thoroughly debated, but as always, they are the result of a first round of conversations. We expect them to be refined over the course of the coming year through discussions with the stakeholders in and outside LUMS.

    

5. The Advisory Committee recommended expanding the vision of the SSE to make the school an exciting proposition both within Pakistan and the larger international community. While retaining the core strengths of an MIT/Caltech/Stanford model (a research university), it should demonstrate strength by establishing itself as an innovative educational effort; and should be seen as more than a clone. The Committee recommended the tagline ‘No Boundaries’ after much deliberation, i.e. the SSE should be called a ‘Research School with No Boundaries’. The ‘No Boundaries’ tagline attempts to succinctly describe the many dimensions of the impact the SSE hopes to contribute to. To illustrate these dimensions, a list is below (neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive; it only lists the ideas discussed at the meeting itself). The ‘No Boundaries’ concept will not and should not imply a dilution of the SSE’s focus on achieving excellence in scholarship and education. Instead, it attempts to envision the eventual impact of the school – achieved around a core of excellent faculty and students.
    

   a.   No educational-level boundaries: SSE should eventually (perhaps after reaching steady-state) attempt programs penetrating into primary and secondary schools, in addition to its initial focus on undergraduate and graduate education.

   b.   No economic boundaries: SSE should invest significant energy in creating strong scholarship programs, to be able to offer need-blind admissions and to seek and harness talent wherever it is (training students to come up to speed if necessary).

   c.   No gender boundaries: SSE should affirmatively try to reduce any implicit or explicit gender-discrimination in the opportunities it offers.

   d.   No age boundaries: SSE should aim for lifelong learning, a forty-year education instead of a four year education only, and also eventually on executives and mid-career professionals.

   e.   No national or regional boundaries: SSE should recruit faculty and students globally, independent of national or regional constraints. It should aim to do research which is both local and global in its impact.

   f.    No academia-industry boundaries: SSE should invest in private sector collaborations, e.g. internships, industrial outreach programs etc., with both indigenous industries and multi-nationals.

   g.   No academia-government boundaries: SSE should invest in public sector collaborations – both large and small, for both educating public sector leaders and contributing to the most important public problems.

   h.   No institutional boundaries: SSE should establish at least informal relationships with other educational institutions in Pakistan to collectively achieve higher standards. It should openly share its knowledge and experience with others.

   i.    No communication boundaries: SSE should attempt to minimize any walls around the school on communication with the public through publications, seminars etc. (e.g. the MIT Tech Review educates the citizenry about the benefits of Science and Engineering.)

   j.    No departmental/disciplinary boundaries: SSE should not initially have departments, but still offer degrees in the same areas it has already proposed offering (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research). It should instead focus on establishing cross-disciplinary research centers.
    

6. The Advisory Committee recommended strongly that the SSE should have a tenure-track system for recruiting and retaining quality faculty (after much debate). Such a tenure track system:

    

   a.   Should be tied to, and will be essential to achieving, the expanded vision of the SSE (the ‘no boundaries’ expanded vision).

   b.   Should conform to the highest possible standards that are achievable.

   c.   Cannot and should not be formulaic (i.e. based purely on some number of publications without any considerations of local context), and should reward in a balanced way research, teaching, service, and the contribution to addressing relevant problems in the country. It should also recognize the role and institutional contributions of faculty whose work is primarily theoretical. In short, the fact that tenure is a vector and not a scalar needs to be recognized.
    

7. The Advisory Committee recommended that the SSE not establish rigid departmental structures in the beginning. Some of the main arguments and thoughts were:

    

   a.   Most universities in the world, e.g. Stanford, are trying to get away from the departmental silos, because latest research is almost always inter-disciplinary. To take an example, MIT manages the departmental constraints through a matrix structure where the columns represent departments and rows represent research laboratories cutting across departments. Faculty are simultaneously appointed to a department and a research laboratory, but research largely happens in laboratories, rather than in individual departments.

   b.   One can always establish departments later if the need arises, but once established, departments are difficult if not impossible to tear down.

   c.    Lack of departmental boundaries will allow the SSE to leverage a small number of faculty to teach courses across disciplines, and better pool administrative resources.

   d.   The lack of departments should not mean a lack of rigor or of degrees in hybrid fields (e.g. Engineering Science, which has been attempted in other universities). The SSE should still focus on awarding degrees in the disciplines it has already identified (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research).

   e.   The SSE should have inter-disciplinary research centers as the main organizing vehicles for research, and divisions (or some other name for departments) as organizing vehicles for coherent course offerings in each disciplinary area.

SSE Supporters Meeting – July 30, Raza Microelectronics, Cupertino, CA
A follow-on meeting was held with strong supporters of the SSE in the Bay Area on July 30th, 2005. Mr. Syed Babar Ali and Dr. Khurram Afridi participated from LUMS. Friends of LUMS who gave their time were: Professor Asad Abidi, Professor Khalid Aziz, Mr. Sohaib Abbasi, Mr. Zia Chishti, Dr. Salal Humair, Mr. Mir Imran, Mr. Safi Qureshey, and Mr. Atiq Raza.

The meeting discussed the mission of the SSE and LUMS in general, and reinforced the Advisory Committee’s recommendation that the mission should be broad enough to (i) fit in the global trends, (ii) appeal to a wide range of constituencies and (iii) envision real impact. A range of issues, such as funding, research areas, the need for tenure-track appointments, and lack of departmental structures (which had come out of the Advisory Committee meeting) were discussed at length.

Faculty and Funding
Faculty recruitment for the SSE has been deliberately measured for two reasons. First, we have spent significant effort over the last few months deliberating our processes internally and externally, to ensure that our recruitment principles and processes aid and are aligned with the SSE’ s vision. Second, many of the best candidates we eventually hope to recruit for the SSE are, as expected, otherwise employed (many abroad), and not surprisingly, engaging them is a slow process. We do, however, foresee ramping up the recruitment effort soon, since tenure deliberations will be over in a month or two, allowing us to place faculty ads and dedicate more energy to the interviewing and appointment processes. The SSE will also be initiating a search for a Dean who can realize its vision.

Several meetings and presentations to potential donors have taken place in the last two months, both within and outside Pakistan. A few of these have taken place in the US to build a support community for the SSE. Such meetings will continue in the coming months.

Visitors to the SSE
In the past two months, the flow of academic people and ideas has continued through the SSE. In academics, for instance, Dr. Rinku Dutta (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Rutgers), Dr. Rizwan Gul (University of Bahrain - Materials Science and Engineering, MIT), and Dr. Ebad Jahangir (Pratt & Whitney, United Technologies Corporation - Aerospace Engineering, Michigan Ann-Arbor), spent time at the SSE, giving talks, working on the curriculum for the SSE, advising the Project Team, and interacting with the LUMS faculty.

Bios of new Advisory Committee members

Steve Berry is the James Franck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the Department of Chemistry, University of Chicago. He received his A.B., A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has taught at the University of Michigan and Yale University in addition to the University of Chicago. His research has been both theoretical and applied and has led to fundamental contributions, for instance the Berry Pseudo Rotation in Physical Chemistry. At the University of Chicago, his early theoretical work focused on vibronic coupling, autoionization and related processes, including molecular quantum beats. It later expanded to include many scattering phenomena, some of which are still in his current research.  In the late 1960’s, he became interested in efficient use of energy, and began a method of empirical analysis of energy and materials use now known as “lifetime analysis.” This very “applied” work stimulated a new direction of basic science that became the field of finite-time thermodynamics.  More recently, he has studied electron correlation, atomic and molecular clusters, dynamics of proteins and complex energy landscapes. He has been honored for his research and service with several awards. He is a Member and former Home Secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, a MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow and former Vice-President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the Danish Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Zia Chishti is the founding Chairman and CEO of The Resource Group, the largest offshore-controlled business process outsourcing company in the world.  With over $200 million in revenues and over 5000 employees, The Resource Group is Pakistan's most prominent growth company.  At the Resource Group, Mr. Chishti has raised over $100 million in capital, including an initial public offering on the Karachi Stock Exchange.  Prior to founding The Resource Group, Mr. Chishti was the founding Chairman and CEO of Align Technology, a silicon-valley based medical device company.  Mr. Chishti led the development of Align Technology from a two-person startup to over $70 million in revenues, over 1000 employees, and a NASDAQ initial public offering that resulted in a market capitalization of over $1 billion.  At Align Technology, Mr. Chishti raised over $250 million in capital and pioneered Align's process of locating its operations offshore, resulting in over 700 employees in Pakistan.  Prior to founding Align Technology, Mr. Chishti worked at Morgan Stanley & Company in their investment banking division and McKinsey & Company as a consultant.  Mr. Chishti is a graduate of Columbia University where he received his BA degree in Computer Science and Economics and of Stanford University, where he received his MBA degree.