The Making of a World-Class University: Islamabad and the Project of Third World Science

Islamabad University (or IU; now Quaid-e-Azam University) formally came into existence in 1966 as a “center for excellence” focused on postgraduate research and teaching in the sciences. The project, as one of the flagship initiatives of Ayub Khan’s developmental regime, was planned in collaboration with the Ford Foundation and Indiana University, as well as renowned international figures such as physicist Abdus Salam and architect Edward Durell Stone. Envisaged as a hub for world-class research and Third World scientific advancement, the formation of IU was deeply entangled with the formation of national scientific objectives, as well as global aid agendas around the promotion of “indigenous” research and manpower training in developing countries. As such, it straddled multiple scales and dimensions of postcolonial imagining, ambition, and self-projection — seeking at once to transform the academic life of the newly independent nation as well as assert Pakistan’s place within global communities of research and scholarship.

This paper traces the planning and early years of Islamabad University (1960-69) through the eyes of state administrators, educationists, international consultants, scientists, and students. It focuses, in particular, on debates about the production of academic “excellence,” the reversal of brain drain, and the balance of pure vs. applied sciences in deciding the form and direction of the university. I argue that these planning debates were colored by shifting priorities and meanings around “national” and “international” development during a critical period of the Cold War. In historicizing the confluence of planning agendas behind IU’s self-narrativization, this paper offers an alternative institutional history — as a window into the multi-sited encounter between the project of postcolonial sovereignty, the aims of international education, and a global intellectual dialogue about the possibilities of “Third World Science.”