By Dr. Q Isa Daudpota

As a fresh PhD recently returned from the UK, I immediately started being addressed as ‘Doctor Sahib’. Repeated attempts to get colleagues, administration officers and students to refrain from using this honorific title generally failed. New acquaintances are still requested not to be so formal, but twenty-seven years after getting the degree I tend to overlook such silliness.

That’s until I recently discovered the sinister side of getting a degree -- fake degrees to be precise! Before one gets into the murky details of this fake degree business, a peep into the back-patting culture that pervades the educated elite is useful and, dare I say it, amusing. (What I say next is about scientists in Pakistan but the essence, I daresay, applies to other subject specialists with higher degrees.)

It is lunch-time at a science meeting in Islamabad. All the participants have filled their plates to the max and are now chatting as they dig into the meat. When in doubt about the other guy’s degree (or the rare gal), use the title Dr Sahib/Sahiba -- that’s the accepted rule. What may not occur to most people is that the man or woman being addressed may actually be a DON -- a doctor of nothing! The person’s Master’s degree may also be a fake. And if he went for a package deal he could have got a Bachelors and the degrees all the way up to a doctorate for as little as a few hundred dollars.

Not satisfied with this title (real or fake), many strive to add letters after their names, and lobby those in power to get them a national medal (tamgha). A Tamgha-e-Imtiaz or higher, and the Presidential Pride of Performance are sought after. The shallowness of such desires was highlighted in the last few years when Tahira Mazhar Ali refused a posthumous medal for her illustrious husband, Mazhar Ali Khan. A similar refusal to accept a medal came from Pervez Hoodbhoy, who said that such medals were given for the wrong reason to most recipients, and hence devalued.

The medical business -- profession if one is to be polite -- is certainly not immune from such fake degrees, or other unethical practices. Many practitioners in the rural area (of Pakistan) operate with fake or no degrees. Most of those actually passing out from our medical schools are merely licensed to kill. Their professors with higher degrees -- foreign or national -- overwhelmed by pressure of work, or just greed, become mercenaries with little or no commitment to their patients.

Maybe it is best that we do not think about those who are designing our bridges and high-rise buildings. All this is best left for another article.

In early 2002, the Guardian reported on a Liverpool businessman who peddled all kinds of degrees from GCSE to a bachelor from Kings College, London, for about £ 100. To test a similar outfit I visited the web site of Right Track Ref www.righttrackref.com . Following that, I emailed them a note saying that I was interested in a Ph.D. degree from either Caltech or MIT. Without delay I got an offer to supply this at $450! Equally surprising and annoying was the reproduction on this site of a degree from my UK alma mater.

While exploring the business of issuing fake degrees from the Net, one is struck by the connivance of established magazines and journals that gain from the advertisements of such fake degrees awarding outfits. Take the Economist weekly whose high price pages carry ads about courses and degrees from the top business and management schools. The smaller ads, contrary to the high standard elsewhere in the magazine, openly flaunt the availability of fake degrees. The magazine is clearly aware of the fraud but hides behind the excuse that its customers are smart enough to know what they are getting into! The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, has stopped such ads after John Bear, a fighter against such ‘diploma mills’, approached them.

Those who wish to study this phenomenon and defeat it would do well to visit Bear’s web site: www.degree.net. Officers at the Higher Education Commission (HEC), which operates in the federal capital and looks after higher education in the country, as well as those in the provincial and federal education ministries, should certainly do so. The status and range of activities of the diploma mills is changing continuously and therefore needs to be monitored by our regulatory bodies.

In March of this year several websites offering fake British degrees for up to £1,000 each have been closed down following a joint operation in the UK and the US. The certificates, from 14 made-up institutions, were used by hundreds of unqualified people, mainly in North America, to gain jobs in areas such as teaching, computing and childcare. The operation, which employed 30 staff in Romania, targeted millions of people every day with circular e-mails.

According to the investigator of this crime, “Those people who bought the degrees knew exactly what they were doing. The complaints we received were actually from colleagues of those who got jobs by lying. It’s worrying that they got into such important and responsible positions using the fake degrees.”

The operation, run by a man and a woman, was based at offices in Israel, Romania and the US. It is thought to have made millions of pounds. This excellent 102-page report describes the author’s quest to understand the scandal. An account of my investigation can be seen at www.spider.tm after the first week of July 2003.

Maybe this is not something that we in Pakistan ought to be worried about. Not true! The reason that I got involved in investigating this issue was that within the last six months, I interviewed two candidates for faculty and support positions at my university. The suspicious names of their universities prompted a check on the Net and it did not take long to see that they had obtained fake degrees -- one of them had a Masters and a Ph.D. that he claimed were obtained over several years from Ashford University, a place that has been fully exposed in Gollin’s report.

It is critically important for the HEC to detect people with such bogus foreign degrees and to make other institutions aware of this serious issue. This concerns those applying for new jobs as well as to those entrenched in the system. If an employer has the slightest suspicion, the veracity of the employee’s degree can be checked using the information in John Bear’s publications or by looking at the sources mentioned by Gollin. Direct contact with the person’s degree awarding institute (if accredited) needs to be established and the degree verified, but no time needs to be wasted on people with non-accredited degrees.

Let us not forget the fake and substandard degrees being offered by Pakistani institutions, some of which have received a charter from the government. One such institute headquartered in the US (with two chartered campuses in Pakistan) was reported to be ‘non-accredited’ by the prestigious Chronicle of Higher Education. No action against it has as yet been taken by the HEC. Labels are often deceptive, whether they are on a consumer item or a person’s resume. It is time to be wary. Beware of the Doctor Sahib!

(The writer is a physicist and writes on education, environment, IT and science. He is with the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore)