Please save the university

I have a personal association with the University of Peshawar. Well before I was born, my father taught there. My siblings were born in Peshawar during this time, and many close family friends are from this period. I am not the only one who has personal and emotional links to the university. Hundreds of thousands of people, scattered all over the world have their own personal ties to this institution of learning. Some are in important government positions. The HEC chairman, Dr Banuri, is an alumnus. The late father, and poet extraordinaire, of Minister of Information, Ahmed Faraz got his degree from the university as well.

So, it was with deep sadness that I learned that the financial health of this institution, the largest in the province, has become so bad that the university had to make major cuts in the salaries of its faculty and staff. I can imagine the announcement, made just a week before the salary was to be issued and at a time of severe anxiety, must have come as a terrible blow to many who live paycheck to paycheck. The impact on the families of the staff are going to be serious, and perhaps permanent. The communication from the upper administration of the university makes it unclear whether the cuts are for just a month or the foreseeable future. There is no pathway — at least in the communication — about how to come out of this hole.

Higher education in Pakistan is poorly funded despite the bombastic claims to the contrary of various ministers and government. Every year, HEC is provided only a fraction of the funds it needs to stay afloat. The problems are compounded from year to year. That it would happen to the premier institution in the province that the current government has been running for nearly a decade should raise serious questions about priorities of the party that claimed to be a champion of higher education.

Three possible solutions come to mind to come out of this mess, which are in addition to an analysis of university spending and ensuring any unethical or wasteful spending practices are curbed immediately. The first, and most obvious, is also the least likely to succeed. It’s reducing expenditure on what takes up most of our budget and putting a tiny fraction of that in higher education. The second is increasing tax base, which we know is not going as well as we had hoped. And then who is to say that any extra tax revenue collected wouldn’t end up paying fines on leases for PIA in Malaysia?

So, we are stuck with the hardest third solution. This is about universities trying to increase their own revenue through several possibilities. One, and an unpopular one, would be to increase the fees and then offer financial aid to those in need. There are some affluent families who can certainly afford to pay more, and there are others who can’t even afford the current fees. Those who can, should pay more, and those who are struggling shouldn’t pay anything. A second dimension would be to train faculty on writing international grants and creating incentives for writing and securing grants. For now, most faculty (even those who are academically gifted) struggle to write good grants and the current HEC grant writing streams are deficient in many ways. Third, and final approach is robust fundraising from alumni. This would require a serious cultural change, but every little bit matters.

None of these will solve the immediate problem, and for that the university will need a bailout. But this is not a short-term problem and cannot be thought of as such. Saving a university is more than saving an institution — it is about saving our ability to think, reflect, analyse and create a better future.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 26^th, 2021.

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