Decay in Pakistan’s higher education, but does anyone care?
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Some months ago, a sexual harassment scandal in Balochistan University made national headlines. Officials in charge of campus security had installed cameras at different locations for the purpose of preventing militants from entering university premises, located in the restive southwestern province.
Instead, security staff began spying on any social interactions between male and female students which is taboo in the conservative, largely tribal society of Balochistan. After getting their hands on the CCTV footage, and through blackmail, they sexually exploited and harassed female students and threatened to leak the videos if they spoke up or resisted.
Initial reports suggest this has been going on for years, and evidently quite a few people knew about it. The Balochistan High Court has finally taken notice of the sexual exploitation of helpless students and assigned an inquiry to the Federal Investigation Agency, which is scheduled to submit its reports to the Court in the next few days.
In the meantime, the Vice-Chancellor has resigned, hanging his head in shame. Sexual harassment in Pakistan’s public universities is a bigger problem than just one scandal exposed by some courageous victims in Quetta, Balochistan.
It is evident that universities lack adequate institutional mechanisms against sexual predators that happen to be students, as well as among the faculty and administration.
Rasul Bakhsh Rais
In September this year, the murder of Nimrita Amarta Maher Chandani, a final year student of dental surgery at the Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Medical University in Larkana shocked the country. She was raped and murdered in her hostel room. A judicial commission is conducting an inquiry.
It is evident that universities lack adequate institutional mechanisms against sexual predators that happen to be students, as well as among the faculty and administration. Nor are there effective student organizations — they have been banned for the last 40 years for political reasons — or trustworthy peers with whom victims of harassment can confide. They are left to fend for themselves and a vast majority of them suffer in silence.
The rot began with political appointments of vice-chancellors in public universities, without considering merit, suitability, experience or moral, professional integrity. In many universities, they have been on the beck and call of their political bosses. They have been making academic and administrative appointments without merit, and disregard established rules and regulations.
The previous vice-chancellor of Punjab University, the oldest seat of academic learning in Pakistan since colonial times, was sent to jail for corruption in humiliation. He is out on bail facing serious charges of misuse of authority and nepotism. More alarmingly, three former vice-chancellors of three different public universities gave license to private business partners to establish eleven branches of their universities, which is unprecedented. Suspecting foul play, the National Accountability Bureau, a national watchdog against corruption, filed corruption cases against the two and sent them to jail. Going by press reports, some others have been suspended for allegations of corruption, and some are being investigated. The rot is too deep to tell every story.
However, corruption is not confined to the administrators only. A good number of faculty members are equally involved in questionable academic practices, like publishing in fake online journals and getting promotions. There are many who have been supervising Ph.D. dissertations and signing on awarding of degrees without themselves publishing a single paper in any well recognized peer-reviewed academic journal. At least in the social sciences, the field I am adequately aware of, most of the graduate programs don’t enough qualified faculty to run them.
The case of private-for-profit universities that have proliferated in the hundreds over the past thirty years, is worse. As we know from the experience of universities around the world, it is difficult to make money out of a university without possibly compromising on quality, crowding classrooms, and running programs without enough qualified faculty. In Pakistan, these ‘universities’ have become diploma mills.
Pakistan’s public higher education, colleges, and universities, has been in a mess for decades. Every government in history promised to reform it by coming up with new education policy, but in the end, it passed the buck to the next government, military or civilian. The question is: Will Prime Minister Imran Khan succeed where others have failed? After about a year and a half in power, nothing remarkable has happened, except the repetition of the same rhetoric about ‘change.’ Khan, like his predecessors, faces the formidable challenge of confronting the vested interests in the public and private educational sectors. The latter have invested heavily in every level of education from nursery to medical colleges, engineering, and general universities with campuses all over the country, and is not amenable to regulation. Perhaps the public sector can show the way by reforming itself and leading, the way it did about forty years ago.
For conceiving and implementing reforms, the government needs to strengthen and empower the Higher Education Commission to set standards, regulate higher education, and provide adequate funding for research and development to public universities. Besides academic affairs, the governance of public educational institutions is a big problem. Even the best of vice-chancellors confront intervention from political elements, students aligned with political parties and unionized staff. As universities are administratively autonomous, making their two key institutions — senate and syndicate — widely representative of civil society, academia, business, and state institutions may counterbalance the power of the vice-chancellors and check the misuse of authority.
*Rasul Bakhsh Rais is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS, Lahore. His latest book is “Islam, Ethnicity and Power Politics: Constructing Pakistan’s National Identity” (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Twitter: @RasulRais
