Ammar Jaleel A PROFESSOR WITH A FAKE DEGREE

Ammar Jaleel

AMAR JALEEL

                A PROFESSOR WITH A FAKE DEGREE

[No weaver can weave a cloth; no tailor can stitch apparel that can hide your ugliness. A Sufi maxim]

Way back in 1974 a person with a Ph.D from an American University was directly appointed a Professor in Peoples’ Open University, Islamabad, renamed Allama Iqbal Open University by the dictator Ziaul Haq in 1977. Established on the behest of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, it was first Open University in Asia, for that matter in this part of the world. It had expertise in teaching trough Distance Education Systems. The printed material mailed to the registered students was supplemented and complemented through electronic media, Radio and Television. The system constituted the crux of the Open Learning. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had envisaged that an Open University had an answer to the multifarious educational needs of the country from Adult Education to the Continuing Education that provides life-long learning opportunities to the masses as well as the people engaged in earning a livelihood. Indira Gandhi Open University, India, University of the Air, Japan, and Sukhothai Thamatherat Open University, Thailand came up almost after a decade.  

Apart from holding a Master’s degree in the relevant subject an incumbent teacher’s exposure to electronic media was considered an additional qualification for his appointment in the Open University. The Professor we are talking about had several testimonials related to his active participation in the Radio and Television programmes in the United States. I would not divulge his name. May be during the last thirty-six years he, after diverting from his crooked path is living an honorable life somewhere on this earth. I do not want to embarrass him. It is birthright of a wayward person to amend his evil ways, repent, and live a neat clean life. However, for the sake of narration let us give our professor a name. Let us call him Professor Paparwala.

Professor Paparwala had joined the Peoples’ Open University in its inception in 1974. He was a jolly good fellow, and entertained the small faculty with his silly jokes during the tea break. Five or six faculty members (the teachers), the Registrar, and the treasurer wondered at his gimmickries. His overall mannerism was crude, particularly towards the female faculty members. By no stretch of imagination he appeared to have had been educated abroad, or had taught at the American Universities for twenty years. What eventually surprised everyone in the University was that the Professor Paparwala never wrote, or spoke a word in English.

The media personnel in the University persuaded Professor Paparwala to come to the Radio and Television studios for delivering a lecture on the subject of his choice, and in the language he deemed suitable. He never obliged them. Within a year or so he became conspicuous for his nonacademic pursuits. No one new how, and from where the Registrar gathered the information that the degrees of the Professor Paparwala were fake, and that he had ever been to America! The Registrar conveyed the startling information to the Vice Chancellor who promptly but confidentially passed on the curious case to the University Grants Commission, now renamed Higher Education Commission. The Professor Paparwala got the wind of what was cooking against him, and he went missing.

Within a few days the University Grants Commission confirmed that no such University existed in America that had issued Ph.D and other degrees to the Professor Paparwala. And, the Universities the Professor had claimed to have had taught at for 20 years were nowhere in existence in the United States of America. The University Grants Commission very strongly recommended to the Open University that a case for fraud, cheating and beguiling the University be filled against the fake professor; and the salary, allowances, house rent, and the fringe benefits he had enjoyed for over a year be recovered from him. But, by then the fake professor had proverbially vanished.

The climax of the story is tragic. You may call it outrageous. Professor Paparwala after fraudulently grabbing the post of a professor in the Peoples’ Open University manipulated a decent family, and succeeded in entering into wedlock with a highly educated daughter of theirs who was an Assistant Professor in a girls’ college. No one in the family thought they had given away their daughter in marriage to a crook. I leave it to your sensibilities to feel the intensity of the shock, ignominy, and dismay of the family.

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