The New York Times ‘Saturday profile’ is of Pakistani industrialist and philanthropist Syed Babar Ali, who helped found the Lahore University of Management and Science, or LUMS.
Good public education can create opportunity in societies, but in Pakistan it has been underfinanced and ignored, in part because the political class that runs the country does not consume its services. Fewer than 40 percent of children are enrolled in school here, far below the South Asian average of 58 percent. As a result, Pakistan’s literacy rate is a grim 54 percent.
For Mr. Ali, education was the country’s most urgent need, and in 1986 he helped create L.U.M.S. Founded as a business school, it later added a rigorous liberal arts program, one of the strongest in Pakistan. Breaking with the tradition of rote learning, the school encourages its professors, many recruited from abroad, to foster debate in classes, and its graduates tend to be critical thinkers with open minds.
These days the university attracts many offspring of wealthy Pakistanis, who would otherwise have gone to the United States or the United Kingdom for their undergraduate studies.
