C.8 Other Fields or Components Considered
     
    The overwhelming case for AKU's being a "fully wired" university has stimulated discussion of the need for it to have programmes of instruction and research in information and computer sciences. This concern has been reinforced by concerns about the need for Pakistan to be more than a user and consumer of' products developed elsewhere. The Commission has, however, remained sceptical, recallin.parallel questions about statistics and population studies. An AKU weak in either of these fields would be deplorably ill-equipped for its mission. But this does not mean that AKU should have departments of statistics or demography, any more than many other distinguished universities do. AKU will need many competent users of modern information science who are not information specialists. It will no doubt need a few people to guide the acquisition, use, and maintenance of networks and university-wide systems, but this does not mean AKU need enter into formal training programmes for such specialists.
     
    We do recognise that there inay be a case in Pakistan and in some other parts of thc, world of particular interest to AKU for expawlell professional education in these fields at home. The, celebrated successes of India in software development suggest that there may be attractive niches of comparative advantage in these subjects for developing countries. We have, however, questioned the desirability and feasibility of AKU considering a venture in this field as a somewhat isolated undertaking. The frequent location of departments of computer science in engineering faculties or similar technological contexts reminds us of the lack of such contexts in AKU we are envisaging. The Commission has had some discussion of the desirability of AKU addressing additional needs for technological education, and there were voices in the Karachi faculty and staff so urging. When, however, we came to consider the priority to be ffiven to these subjects we agreed to give higher priority to liberal arts and sciences rather than to further professional education, particularly at first degree level.
     
    The questions of AKU's future in information and computer sciences are certainly complex and may appear differently in the not distant future. We have recommended that a special planning study should be made of AKU's needs in information and communication following on this Commission's efforts. It should address these subjects on a university-wide basis, with its focus on the capacities and competencies needed for AKU's functions in education, research and service. The possible development of instructional programmes in these fields should not be central, hut need not be excluded.
     
  8.3 Environment and Resource Studies
     
  8.3.1 The Commission has, almost from the beginning of its deliberations, debated whether or not it should plan a special component for environmental and resource studies in AKU's future. No one on the Commission has questioned the seriousness of environmental problems in the developing and Muslim worlds. Some of us have followed the work of the (Brundtland) World Commission on Environment and Development in the late 1980s, and the Rio de Janeiro conference on these subjects attracted world-wide attention during the period of the Commission's life. We have latterly, in the person of the newly appointed Acting Rector, had the counsel of an experienced student of environmental problems who is urgently concerned with their seriousness and neglect in Pakistan and other developing countries.
     
  8.3.2 We would not be content with a future AKU that ignored environmental problems. When the Institute of Planning and Management of Human Settlements is initiated, it will be heavily engaged with environmental questions. But AKU will not be neglecting such questijns until that Institute appears. A university with a Faculty of Health Sciences that is already deeply involved in community health and starting a programme in health policy and management could hardly ignore the environmental stresses that contribute so heavily to the health problems of Pakistan and other developing countries. We have also been confident that the Institute of Human Development would arouse awareness of the multiple costs of raising children in settings with unsafe drinking water, or unacceptable levels of air pollution. In proposing that AKU establish an Institute of Economic Growth and Society we have made explicit that this Institute would be concerned with "sustainable development" in the sense popularised by the Brundtland Commission and now orthodoxy in the development community. We would hope that this part of AKU would help avoid ultimately disastrous economic policies like the excessive dependence on irrigated agriculture in Central Asia, and also seek ways out of such past errors. In sum, AKU will have through the next decade a widening variety of engagement with environmental questions. It may be objected that they are uneven and likely to be more concerned with urban than with rural areas, but in a world that will have an urban majority by 2030 and in a University that has a special and fateful tie to a Third World metropolis, this may be no bad thing.
     
  8.3.3 Will all this be enough to do justice to the variety and seriousness of environmental questions that now beset the world ? That is the question that has stimulated continuing debate. Certainly there are important subjects like global changes that would not come within the agendas of the parts of the future AKU we have named. The staffing of a unit devoted frontally to environmental questions would undoubtedly involve professional competencies that a more dispersed assault on those questions would lack. There is thus unquestionably merit on both sides of this debate, but on balance the Commission has concluded that it should not extend an already very demanding array of new developments in AKU to give further assurance that it will deal with the environmental problems of the developing and Muslim worlds.

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