Gov’t committee in Pakistan lets plagiarizing vice-chancellor off the hook

A government expert committee in Pakistan last year cleared a university vice-chancellor of plagiarism charges based on inconsistent claims of ignorance, Retraction Watch has learned. 

The committee, which was convened by the Higher Education Commission (HEC), also appears to have flouted rules that would have held the vice-chancellor responsible even if he had no knowledge of any plagiarism committed by work under his supervision. HEC funds and oversees higher education in Pakistan.

“This sends the wrong message to the academic community and undermines the credibility of the HEC,” Farukh Iqbal, who brought the charges, told Retraction Watch.

The case seemed simple enough at first. But it has since spiraled into a saga that may reveal as much about the value of political muscle in Pakistan as it does about academic dishonesty.

In October 2020, Iqbal was working toward a PhD in chemical engineering at RMIT University in Australia when he noticed a new paper in the journal Fuel that looked familiar. The authors, it turned out, had lifted heavily from Iqbal’s 2017 master’s thesis, as we reported in 2021.

Iqbal complained to both the HEC and Fuel. The journal investigated and found that Iqbal’s work had indeed been plagiarized. It pulled the paper in June 2021. (The retraction notice mistakenly refers to a PhD thesis.)

That same month, however, the first author of the retracted paper, Vice-chancellor Muhammad Suleman Tahir of Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology, in Rahim Yar Khan, returned fire. In a long-winded email to RMIT, he accused Iqbal of plagiarizing from a 2019 master’s thesis by a student that Tahir had supervised. He also expressed frustration at Fuel‘s “one-sided decision” to retract “our paper.”

Tahir and his coauthors also brought a 500 million rupee (~$2,800,000USD) defamation suit against his accuser. As we reported last year, they argued that Iqbal’s “ugly campaign” had “irreparably injured … [the] credit, character, reputation and health” of the plaintiffs, who have suffered “indescribable isolation, persecution, mental torture, humiliation and material loss” in the process.

After looking into Tahir’s allegations, RMIT concluded that it was indeed Iqbal, and not the vice-chancellor, who was the victim of plagiarism.

In Pakistan, however, HEC officials viewed matters differently. 

A response from early 2021 to Iqbal’s complaint stated, “Dear citizen, text of your repeated complaint lacks quantitative facts, rather it reflects your personal grievance with the accused. The mentioned paper have [sic] been looked into with closed look by the plagiarism standing committee and your claim is not found true, anywhere!”

Iqbal complained several more times, as he explained in a submission to the HEC. In the end, the HEC convened an expert committee to review the case, and in February 2022 the committee issued its report. In a written statement to the committee, the report said, the vice-chancellor had explained that “he was not aware of the [now-retracted] publication and his name was added without his consent.”

In fact, Tahir was the one who approached Fuel and asked for the retraction, according to the report. 

“The committee found nothing contrary to what [Tahir] has presented in his letter / written statement. Therefore, he was not found responsible for the publication of the alleged plagiarized paper,” the report states. 

It added, however, that the source of the data in the Fuel paper was the thesis submitted by Tahir’s student Numair Manzoor, and that Manzoor’s thesis was “completely plagiarized as claimed by Mr. Farukh Iqbal.” But that was of no import for the complaint against the vice-chancellor, the committee found, and it recommended “no penalty against him.”

In his complaint, Iqbal also cited regulations that had been reaffirmed by the HEC in 2017. According to this statute, if a master’s thesis was found to be plagiarized, the supervisor would “also be held responsible for this act and will be blacklisted for five (05) years,” and “disciplinary action against such supervisor should also be initiated by the respective university.”

Iqbal knew that even a cursory look at the evidence showed that Tahir had been well aware of the Fuel paper and had in fact opposed its retraction, as Tahir himself had explained in his email to RMIT. Tahir had also acknowledged his authorship in the defamation suit against Iqbal. 

Iqbal also bristled at the claim that the vice-chancellor had been the one to request the retraction of the Fuel paper. Not only did it contradict Tahir’s email to RMIT, Iqbal also had an email from Elsevier, the journal’s publisher, in which it shared with him the “great news” of the retraction and thanked him for his patience with the process. 

Tahir has not faced any sanctions, as far as Retraction Watch is aware. Neither he nor the HEC responded to our requests for comment.

Iqbal, who says the experience contributed to his decision to leave his PhD studies, filed an appeal to the HEC in March 2022. He was told the expert committee would make a decision within 60 days.

Almost a year later, he has still not heard back. 

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