Sir

Athar Osama and colleagues' Opinion article (Nature 461, 38–39; 2009) aims to provide a factual balance-sheet for Pakistan's higher-education system under General Pervez Musharraf. But several critical omissions leave it less than factual.

For example, the former government wasted enormous sums of money on prestige mega-projects. Nine new universities were abandoned after partial construction because of a lack of trained faculty, and expensive imported scientific equipment remains under-utilized many years later. The claimed 400% increase in publications was a result of salary bonuses awarded to professors who published in international journals, largely irrespective of substance and quality. These payments fostered a plagiarism culture that still goes unpunished.

The authors draw attention to a large increase in “relative impact” in some disciplines, based on citation of papers published in 2003–07. But were self-citations (a common ploy) eliminated from this count? I used an option available from Thomson Scientific and found the opposite result after eliminating self-citations.

The authors also praise the Higher Education Commission for increasing university professors' salaries. But this has created social disparities — a full professor now earns 20–30 times more than a school teacher. Professors, bent on removing barriers to their promotions and incomes, take on very large numbers of PhD students. To ensure that these students get their degrees, many professors seek the elimination of international testing, hitherto used as a metric for gauging student performance.

Pakistan's failed experiment provides a counter-example to the conventional wisdom that money is the most crucial element in the reform process. An enormous cash infusion has failed to improve teaching and research quality. There is much that other developing countries can learn from our experience — sadly, this is not what the authors convey.