| not as resourceful as they might be in making the best of what they do have to hand. At the same time, it is also a matter of organisation; making arrangements and rules that books, equipment, information and clerical assistance are conveniently available in working order—when needed. In the field of the applied sciences, agriculture, engineering and management in particular—it was frequently said that officials and entrepreneurs do not turn to the national universities for advice, but go direct to foreign experts. Perhaps they do not know the appropriate skills exist at home, or do not feel confidence in them. Often it is easier to ask an international or foreign fund to supply an expensive foreign expert than to find national funds of a much more modest order. Very frequently complete technologies are purchased and imported as going concerns, and all snags and failures are reported direct to the supplier. Businessmen say they cannot afford to risk national experts who lack the backing of major international organisations. Local technologists claim they could cope, with major savings in cost. Most of the other points listed centre on the relative infrequency of what one might call research mindedness. Teaching and administrative loads are often very heavy. Energetic, able and ambitious university staff get themselves involved in other activities. Istanbul Technical University staff, for example, teach in no less than 19 other institutions. University staff are very often moved upwards and sideways into ministries or into political parties; or into senior administrative posts in the university itself. Less able, less energetic and less ambitious staff are less likely to produce valuable research. Recently I met a distinguished senior colleague. She opened the conversation with criticism of a recent publication, and I said ‘Talking Shop?' 'Of course,’ she replied, 'what else is worth talking about?' It is my strong impression that her view of life and work is even rarer in CENTO universities than in ours. How far do people discuss research plans and experiences, share their views of books, meet formally or informally and talk shop? On the contrary, I was told that in |
| many cases, people are positively chary of any such discussion, either for fear of revealing their own shortcomings, or for fear that others may steal their academic clothes. Perhaps I can turn this point as a question. How well organised, active and effective in the three countries are the subject based meetings and associations of university staff? It is of course true that in your universities research is a normal condition of entry to the profession. In Turkey for example, a doctorate is required by law, and at least one further major research exercise is necessary for promotion. But how reliable a guarantee is a doctorate from a wide range of foreign and national universities? Even if the work done is fully competent, the student may well regard it not as an intellectual adventure, as a search for unexpected facts, for the resolution of intriguing puzzles, for the reformulation of established assumptions, but as a chore, a formal routine to be undergone in order to qualify for a government salary for life. OVERSEAS TRAINING AND FOREIGN STAFF The doctorate which is required in Turkey and Iran, and desirable in Pakistan, for university staff is more often than not obtained abroad. Those who do not go abroad for undergraduate or graduate training often go abroad later. Thus, I was told more than once of Turkish Universities where 90% of the staff had been to foreign universities. In 1972, I calculated from approximate figures that some 7,000 Turks were studying abroad in all kinds of programmes (some admittently short term)—enough to fill a graduate university, or even two. In Pakistan in 1974, I was told that national Ph.D. programmes are only just beginning, and that virtually all those with Ph.D.'s have been trained in Britain or the U.S.A. This huge programme, which must cost, for each country, at least $ 20 million a year, is the main solution to the problem of importing knowledge by the academic channel. Some such programme was and still is necessary to get universities founded and staffed, and undoubtedly those with foreign training have contributed a vast amount to their countries. |
| Yet it seems to me that the time has come to look carefully at this policy, to consider making very large cuts and trensfering the savings into more profitable schemes. The most obvious drawback to the scheme is the so-called "brain drain". The U.S.A. has 40% of the world's scientists of whom 10% are foreign born. But only about 10% of all the world's scientists are natives of the third world. Therefore, native-born third world scientists resident in the U.S.A. must represent a very high proportion of all Third World Scientists. If we look at quality, the situation is even more serious. It is those who become sought after because of their outstanding ability who are least likely to return, while those who get relatively easy doctorates by the skin of their teeth at low ranking institutions are far less likely to stay abroad. Thus the system involves an appalling element of waste for the developing countries. Counter measures have had some success, but are no more than palliatives. Secondly, the subjects on which they work for their theses are seldom relevant to their national needs; and the level of sophistication of their training is not always suited to their future tasks. They may well bring back the wrong kind of knowledge, and a whole set of inappropriate norms, ideas, and equipment needs. Thirdly, students abroad may become used to a standard of living and an academic environment which their own country cannot provide. Fourthly, it is very often extremely difficult to fit them in on their return in such a way as to give them salary and job satisfaction, and at the same time to make effective use of the training they have received. Fifthly, I would add one less familiar but highly relevant point. The more able students who do not remain abroad are very likely so to impress their teachers that they are encouraged to undertake research in line with the interests of the foreign university, and then to keep in touch and to continue in this line of research after their return. The result is that a large proportion of the best researchers in the third world countries do nothing for the third world in general or their own country in particular, except in prestige terms, but rather help to increase the vast lead in the creation of new |
| knowledge for the industrialised nations. These ties to western universities also atomise the academic profession in the home country, since many of the most able university teachers are more interested in their relations to Princeton or Heidelberg or Paris or Manchester than they are in their relation to their own national colleagues in other national universities, who often have their own rival overseas friends. Hence the building of the informal pressures to research, through local scientific and scholarly communities, is hindered rather than helped. I would myself most strongly advocate a switch to a very much more careful planning of a severely limited foreign studentship programme, and a much increased and carefully planned scheme for bringing competent foreign teachers to the regional universities, in most cases for two years at a time, mainly to concentrate on assisting in graduate training. TYPES OF RESEARCH: CONCEPTUAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE PROBLEMS So far, I have skirted round the central problem: what, in fact, are we here to discuss? The two key words are plainly research and development. Development, except by implication, I leave to others. But I propose to discuss research for most of the rest of this paper. If we accept for the moment that research is the creation of new knowledge, and then ask what goes on in universities and other places in the name of research, the range of activities which this definition covers is plainly vast. The range extends from nuclear rockets to recording the weekly budgets of the handicapped in shanty towns, or cataloguing mediaeval coins. We are cored with the encouragement and administration of research, and therefore necessarily with its assessment. However deplorable from the academic point of view,—that all knowledge is got—costs and benefits are directly relevant. Any attempt to discuss research in these terms must distinguish types of research. But once we begin to make distinctions, all kinds of conceptual problems arise, many with moral, political and philosophical implications. Many discussions on my first pre-conference tour involved implicit, and often explicit, classifications of research. Most |