Higher Education Council and the issue of self-interest

I can’t remember a time when more Jordanian professors were running for the presidency of universities, with only a few of them offering anything more than general suggestions to improve higher education and solve its problems.

The crisis we have witnessed over the past several months in the performance of the Higher Education Council (HEC) is one of “interests”; for I am convinced that it is wrong to think that the origin of the crisis is differences in views on higher education issues, most importantly those related to raising university admission scores, financial challenges, exceptions and expansion of technical education. The main issue, though, is the renewal or non-renewal of university presidents whose terms have ended; with clear ambitions of some HEC members to nominate themselves for the presidency of these universities, which is a clear case of “conflict of interest”. Although the Higher Education Law does not prevent council members from running for the presidency of universities, in a democratic environment that defeats the principle of “equal opportunity”.

If they insist on running for the post, it would be logical to ask them to resign from the HEC board, as is the case for whoever wants to run for the Lower House, before nominating themselves for the presidency of a university.

Just look at the recent council discussions — with the interest of competing for the post of president, HEC members went too far in questioning the performance of all the university presidents, establishing several committees from within the council to judge their performance, again a clear case of conflict of interest. These “ego” centred discussions resulted in chaos and turbulence in the work of the council.

There was no way, in hindsight, for Higher Education Minister Labib Khadra to avoid a confrontation with some of the members that could have worked it out; which, of course, resulted in the removal of five board members.

Given the facts that we know now, it is obvious that special interests, not the interests of Jordanian academia, are causing this “extreme struggle” for university presidencies.

These interests also caused a storm in higher education, although it would have been possible to steer the council to safe shores if the former members had sincere intentions to serve Jordanian academia, unfortunately that was not the case.

Finally, now that the new HEC is in business, we wish for a strong start and fruitful discussions on principal university matters instead of pure self-interest matters that would help resolve higher education challenges and academic issues in Jordan.

The writer is dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Hashemite University. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.