COMSATS has sacked pro-rector Haroon Rashid

COMSATS Institute of Information Technology has terminated the services of pro-rector Haroon Rashid on grounds of his plagiarized doctoral thesis.

Mr. Rashid was first suspended from service on June 12 after being found guilty of plagiarism charges. His PhD was also withdrawn by Preston University after the Islamabad High Court confirmed the truth of charges against him. On the meeting it was mutually agreed that Mr. Rashid would be given a personal hearing on June 17. But prior to that, he fled the country along with his family and did not show up at the hearing held yesterday. As a result, the COMSATS Board of Governors took the decision to terminate his services as a valid PhD is a pre-requisite for the position of a pro-rector.

The news first started circling at the beginning of June after an HEC inquiry concluded that Haroon Rashid had plagiarized his PhD thesis. An investigating body from Preston University found out that Mr. Rashid’s thesis had been copied up to 72%. The original thesis was written by Rafiqul Zaman Khan and the topic for his thesis was “Empirical Study of Task Partitioning, Scheduling and Load Balancing Strategies for Distributed Images of Computing System”.

Interestingly enough, Mr. Rashid also happened to be the CEO of the National Testing Service (NTS). However, according to sources close to NTS say that it was registered with the SECP under the name ‘Haroon Rashid’, not ‘Dr. Haroon Rashid’ and so a PhD is not a pre-requisite to be its CEO. The future of that still remains to be decided.