In the English-speaking Western world, home to almost all the top universities in the world, plagiarism is a serious offense. If someone in academia is accused of plagiarism, and the charge sticks, it usually means the end of the person's academic career, and rightly so. In plain-speak, plagiarism is theft. You can't get into someone's house and take away their belongings on the sly and make them your own. Similarly, in today's knowledge-driven world, you can't lift someone's intellectual work and try to pass it off as your own. The new Tribhuvan University Vice-Chancellor, Tirtha Khaniya, did just that when he in 2006 copied, verbatim, parts of an academic paper of Turkish academic Ferit Kilickaya. The plagiarized article was then published in a journal of the Nepal English Language Teachers' Association (NELTA). When Kilickaya first came to know about the plagiarized work in 2012, he wrote to both Khaniya and NELTA asking for explanation. NELTA investigated the allegation and found that Khaniya was indeed guilty of plagiarism. NELTA apologized with Kilickaya for its grave oversight. But Khaniya, to this day, has not replied to Kilickaya, nor has he accepted his guilt. And now he has been appointed the Vice-Chancellor of the country's most important academic institution.Khaniya's academic credentials, barring the single incident of plagiarism, are impeccable. He has proven his mettle as an administrator during his tenures at the Higher Secondary Education Board and the National Planning Commission. As an academic, his groundbreaking research in Nepali education system earned him a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1990 and he has since had an extensive teaching career in Tribhuvan University. Even so, his appointment as the TU vice-chancellor has been mired in controversy, and not just because of his tainted past. Khaniya was appointed vice-chancellor on the recommendation of Nepali Congress, the senior partner in the ruling coalition. Apparently, his appointment was made without consulting CPN-UML, the junior coalition partner. This is the reason the association of professors affiliated to UML have for the past six days padlocked the offices of all five universities that recently got their vice-chancellors. They have accused the VC-recommendation committee under Education Minister Chitra Lekha Yadav of bias as the roster of new VCs did not include professors affiliated to the association. But they couldn't be the least bothered, it seems, that a proven plagiarist has been given such an important job.
This system of appointment of vital office bearers on quota basis—the composition of the quota determined by the relative strength of political parties in national politics—has long bedeviled our education system. This time, UML is miffed because the TU, the crown in the jewel of Nepali education system, and hence a source of lucrative contracts and sinecures for the academics close to the party, has been lost to Congress. Whatever the other merits of university officials appointed on quota basis, post appointment, they invariably do the bidding of their mother parties, to the detriment of their institutions. This is why we are strongly in favor of merit-based appointments in our important health and education bodies. The dismal state of public health and education in Nepal won't improve so long as they continue to be treated as recruiting grounds for political cronies—much less ones with a track-record of stealing from his peers.
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