Mass resignations: 13 IVS teachers give up their seats for 21 chairs

Indus Valley School faculty, students and administration emerge from exhibition row.

KARACHI:

Thirteen teachers at the Indus Valley School have resigned after the administration asked them to apologise for writing an email on a controversial exhibition.

The exhibition, 21 Chairs, was held from April 5 to 11 to raise funds for the Institute of Architects Pakistan (IAP). It was set up at the IVS campus gallery but the works were by IAP members. A controversy soon erupted on campus over some of the exhibits appearing to be close “copies” of other works.

A group of IVS teachers — both full- and part-time — sent an e-mail to IVS Executive Director (ED) Samina Khan and the chairman of the executive committee, Sanaullah Qureshi, expressing their concerns. They never signed it, but their names were listed in the email, according to one of the teachers involved. A few days later, the email was forwarded to the IAP.

In the email, the teachers expressed their concerns to IVS about the message being sent to their students. It said that they wanted to bring to the administration’s notice that some of the designs were presumed to be “copies” and copying without giving due credit was plagiarism. The teachers had intended for the email/letter to be an internal memo of concern. When the memo was forwarded to the IAP, the teachers felt that confidentiality had been breached.

The IAP responded by clarifying that in its opinion none of the chairs were plagiarised. A little later, the 13 teachers whose names were on the memo were called in by the administration that gave them an apology letter and asked them to sign it.

The teachers asked for time to consider the matter and subsequently wrote a letter of clarification to the administration, saying that their email was not based on malicious intent.

The teachers were called in for a meeting again. Once there, they were asked to explain their memo to a panel of independent judges. The panel was made up of respected faculty members from different institutions, including National College of Arts’ Naazish Ata Ullah, Professor Shehnaz Ismail, Nighat Mir of Circuit Advertising, Aga Khan Education Network CEO Dr Sadrudin Pardhan, TV1 CEO Seema Tahir and Fuad Azim Hashimi from the IVS board of governors. IBA dean Dr Ishrat Husain could not make it. IVS founder Noorjehan Bilgrami facilitated the panel while ED Samina Khan acted as secretary.

The panel decided that the architects would not take action against the teachers, and the teachers would be asked to retract their statements and apologise.

Two days later, the teachers were given a letter which said that the school acknowledged that their intentions were good but that it took objection to the language they had used in the email/memo: ‘copies’ and ‘plagiarism’.

They were asked for “an unequivocal apology” and if they refused, “disciplinary measures” would be taken against them, which, according to Samina Khan, ultimately meant termination from service.

At that point, the teachers decided it was best to resign.

Sit-ins and outrage

When the students found out about this many of them said they wanted their teachers back. They also want to know who will be teaching them in their place. They claim that the “uncertainty” and the lack of “freedom of expression” are making them increasingly uncomfortable.

They held sit-ins outside the administration offices from Monday through to Thursday holding posters that read, “13 is a big number” and “We want our teachers back”. The administration sat down with the student council and answered their queries. Though most of their explanations did not answer the students’ questions, the administration promised to take into account the fact that the students needed teachers.

Some people, however, feel that 13 members resigning out of a faculty of about ten times that much makes barely a dent. They said that the teachers were replaceable and that life would go on. For their part, the students feel that, “they can replace our teachers but can they replace the atmosphere they built?”

The IAP’s involvement

Arshad Faruqui of IAP told The Express Tribune that his institute had nothing to do with the proceedings as “it was the school’s decision and the administration did what they had to.”

The IVS panel had invited two of the architects concerned, Tariq Hasan and Maria Aslam, to give their input, while Faruqui presented whatever happened in chronological order.

In their response to the teachers’ e-mail, “we just clarified that when you are accusing someone you have to have some solid ground. If you want to have a dialogue, you can. You can contact the curator, no one contacted me. There is a difference between criticism and between accusation.”

The IAP members whose chairs were mentioned in the letter wrote to the school, asking for action to be taken. “With freedom of speech comes responsibility,” said Faruqui, “You cannot accuse people, publicly or privately.”

The administration’s stance

ED Samina Khan explained to The Express Tribune that out of the teachers who left, eight were visiting faculty and were bound to leave anyway as “their contract was expiring at the end of the semester on May 27”.

Five of the teachers were permanent faculty members; they handed in their resignations and after waiting eight days, were given letters of acceptance. She did not feel that the upheaval was as significant as it was being made out to be. “Every year we have about three or four faculty members leaving, nobody is indispensable,” she said, to add perspective to the numbers.

“The school may find people not as great, the same or even better. Not everyone is born with the experience of 10 to 20 years,” she said. “It is the institution that stays, people come and people go.”

Khan, like some other senior faculty members, felt it was a matter of egos and they should have just apologised to the architects whose names have been tarnished. “We apologised, as did the panel, it is a sad thing that such respected names will forever be linked to charges of plagiarism.”

As for the charges themselves, she said it was not the school’s place to judge. “I am not a designer, and I am not an architect. As a manager, I cannot say. The school was only giving its space to the exhibition held by a neutral party. If it was organised by the gallery committee or designed by the faculty, then it would be our responsibility.”

The letter was forwarded to the IAP as it was their event and their matter to look into. “The EC thought that the school has no involvement in any of the processes and decided that only the IAP was involved.”

The Express Tribune spoke to two teachers who had resigned and another along with a current faculty member. They did not want to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter. The Express Tribune also spoke to several students but they did not want to be named either, for fear of being expelled.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 29^th, 2011.