While expanding higher education is a good goal, a serious yet silent issue inside our universities is being completely ignored: the rising trend of academic exploitation and unfair treatment by research supervisors. In many public and private institutions, students operate under immense mental pressure. It has now become an unwritten rule for supervisors to demand co-authorship on research papers without contributing a single sentence of actual work. Even more alarming, there are cases where independent research done entirely by a student is published solely under the professor’s name. This blatant intellectual theft destroys academic integrity and completely discourages young minds from pursuing genuine scientific work.
The Higher Education Commission (HEC) should fix this immediately. They should set up an anonymous online portal where students can report such ethical issues without fear of bad grades or retaliation. If we do not protect our young students from this intellectual bullying, the quality of Pakistani research will continue to decline globally.
Talal Amin
Hub
