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2 |
The Structure and Governance of the Future
AKU |
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The addition of committees will strengthen the
Board's capacity to deal with a more complex university but
it will not lessen the demands on the Board members themselves.
Given the small size of the Board, it is very important that
the competencies and the versatility of it, members be of the
highest attainable standard. The Commission has been made conscious
of needs for careful planning so that turnover in the membership
is anticipated well in advance, and the sorts of needed talent
and experience are properly identified. Suggestions have been
made in the Committee's discussions that the Board's Executive
Committee should regularly alert the Chancellor and the Board
to forthcoming needs and prospects. We do not think it our function
to pronounce on specific ways this planning and anticipation
of needs may be carried out, but we foresee that its importance
will mount as om, recommendations for expanding the University
may be carried out. |
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The future development of AKU will also require
a high order of executive and academic leadership, the subject
to which we now turn. |
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| 2.5 |
The Commission has been consciouss throughout
its work of the critical role that tliv faculty and staff of
AKU have had in bringing the University to its present state
and that they will have in shaping its future. When we are considering
the structure and governance of a university we too easily forget
that universities are less distinguished by how well they are
organised and managed than by the quality of the education and
research the provide. The distinguished future we project for
AKU will depend above all on the intellectual and academic standards
its professors maintain. But purely academic and exectitive
functions cannot and should not be sharply separated. We have
been happy to have had the benefit in our own deliberations
of the extensive, and thoughtful work on the future of AKU that
faculty and staff in Karachi have undertaken. We trust that
this active role of faculty and staff in shaping the future
of the University will continue and that the governance of AKU
will rest on a wide and vigorous participation of those on whose
every day work assures its good functioning. |
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| 2.6 |
The pattern of executive leadership of
AKU in its first decade has not been simple. The Faculty of
Health Sciences has been under the executive and academic leadership
of a series of expatriate medical educators. The formal title
of the position has been Dean and Acting Rector, even when the
only branches of AKU were in the Medical Centre. An apparent
reason for the designation "Acting Rector" is the provision
in the Charter (10:2) stipulating that "The Rector shall be
the chief academic and administrative officer of the University".
As Mr. Mohamed Jaffer, one of the drafters of the Charter, has
confirmed, the University could not property exist from a legal
point of view without someone designated as Rector or Acting
Rector. The Hospital, while intiniately related to the Faculty
of Health Sciences, has until recently been a legally separate
entity under its own board and an executive head, called a Director-General.
Except for a brief initial period, all the Directors-General
have been expatriate professionals in hospital management. The
Medical Centre Committee recommended that Aga Khan University Hospital be brought under the governance of AKU, with the position
of* Director-General preserved, and this recommendation is being
carried out. |
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The dependence on expatriate health professionals
for executive and academic leadership in the hospital and the
Faculty of Health Sciences has left a broad array of Ieadership
functions which they were not equipped to fill. AKU and its
hospital have existed in a complex array of communities : they
function under the authority and influence of their founder,
the Aga Khan himself, and hence in relation to his Secretariat
at Aiglemont; they have also been related to other Aga Khan
institutions and the Ismaili Jamat. The Charter of AKU places
it under the laws of Pakistan; in its business and administrative
affairs the University must relate to the central government
of Pakistan, the provincial government of Sindh and the city
of Karachi in myriad ways. It must also maintain a demanding
array of international relationships, inside and outside the
Ismaili world community. Executive responsibility for this sprawling
array of local, ' national and international relations, and
of functions that include fund raising, banking, finance, space
planning and construction, has rested on an individual, Mr.
Shamsh Kassim-Lakha. His extraordinary responsibilities were
recognised in his title, which was President of the Aga Khan
University Medical Centre. With the initiation of IED and on
recommendation of the Medical Centre Committee (which this Commission
endorsed) Mr. Kassim-Lakha's title was changed to President
of the Aga Khan University Centre. |
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MCC recommended that the three positions here
described be maintained in the new structure resulting from
the absorption of the hospital into the University, with each
officer reporting directly to the Board of Trustees and the
Chancellor. This has been done. Executive leadership for AKU
thus continues to be distributed among three positions. The
desirability of having a convenor of this "troika" was brought
out in discussions between the Commission and the MCC Chairman,
and in the final version of the MCC report, it was proposed
that Mr. Kassim-Lakha be given this responsibility. |
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| 2.7 |
Looking to the future, we foresee an array of
needs for academic and executive leadership, many of which will
become urgent and continuing, if the development we propose
for the University is to be carried forward in a serious and
orderly fashion. We have said that the future AKU will need
planning and governance at two levels, for the University as
a whole, and for the component parts. Strategic planning and
oversight for the University at the senior executive level now
rests primarily on two officers, the Acting Rector and Dean
of the Faculty of Health Sciences, and the President of the
University Centre. The responsibilities these officers now bear
are heavy and diverse; they clearly will need help if they are
to cope satisfactorily with the demands of a new phase of University
development. We are therefore proposing that a new senior
officer, tentatively called a Director of University Planning,
be appointed who would be primarily concerned with the forward
planning of new components of the University and their relations
to existing ones. This officer would report to the Acting Rector,
as chief academic and executive officer of the University, and
work closely with the President on all matters of organisation
and resources. He or she would be expected to link the central
administration with the Task Forces and founding heads engaged
in planning and developing new parts of the university. in company
with the acting rector and President, this officer would be
particularly concerned wiht the priorities to be given to the
development of new programmes and branches wiht the aim of holding
the growth of the university to a planned rather than opportunistic
or inadvertent development. |
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