A professorship is a promise, publicly made

Somewhere in Pakistan this week, a university scholar will be made a professor by a piece of paper. The registrar's office will issue a notification. The pay scale will move up. Colleagues will bring sweets to the department. There will be a photograph. And that will be the whole of it.

Consider what has been missed. The word "professor" comes from the Latin profiteri, which means to declare openly, to say a thing out loud in front of others. Its earliest use was religious: to profess was to declare your faith before witnesses, and then to be bound by what you had said. A professor, then, is not simply someone who knows a great deal. A professor is someone who has stood up and declared what they know, what they will teach, and what they will answer for.

The old universities of Europe built this understanding into their procedures. There were two separate acts:

The first was the licentia docendi, the licence to teach, granted by the chancellor once the candidate's learning had been examined and found sufficient. This was the administrative step, and everyone understood that the licence alone did not make a man a master.

The second act was the inceptio, the inception. Here the faculty itself welcomed the new master into its own community. He delivered a formal inaugural lecture before his colleagues and his students, was welcomed with speeches, and only then did he commence his duties in the master's chair. The word "commencement", which we now use for a convocation, simply meant that something was beginning, not finishing.

None of this is a story of the past. In the Netherlands the practice survives almost intact, in the form of the oratie, the inaugural address. A newly appointed Dutch professor is expected to stand before the academic community and explain the nature of the subject and what he or she now intends to do in it. The address is delivered before the assembled professors, published afterwards as a work in its own right, and preserved in a public series. The declaration is made, it is witnessed, and it is placed on the record. Indonesian universities, which inherited it from the Dutch, still install their professors in much the same way. We are the ones who let it lapse.

Our selection boards count publications, consult referees and apply the minimum criteria rigidly, and all of this happens behind closed doors. Competence is certified in private. A professorship, if properly understood, is conferred instead by an act of speech in public. We have kept the certification and dropped the public declaration, and then we wonder why the title carries so little weight.

Yet a professorship is not a reward for work already completed. It is the moment at which a scholar becomes answerable, for the rest of their life, to their students, to their colleagues, to their institution, and to their society.

If that is what is being conferred, then competence alone cannot be the test. Our promotion cases are built almost entirely on what can be counted. Nobody is asked whether this scholar supervised students generously or used them. Whether their names appeared on papers where it had no business appearing. Whether they examined honestly when honesty was inconvenient. Whether junior colleagues seek them out or avoid them. These are questions of character, and character comes down to two attributes: truthfulness and trustworthiness.

We know that taleem and tarbiyat – i.e. education and character formation – have always been held together in our own traditions, and the reason is plain in the life of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Long before he declared his message, the people of Makkah already called him al-Sadiq al-Amin, the truthful and the trustworthy. When he finally stood on the hill of Safa and called them together, he first asked whether they would believe him if he warned them of an army approaching from behind the hill. They answered that they had never known him to speak an untruth. Only then did he make his declaration.

The order of those events is the whole lesson. Character was established first, over many years and in private dealings. The public declaration came afterwards, and it was credible precisely because of what had come before. A declaration made by a person of unproven character persuades nobody. This is as true in a university as it was on the hill.

There is a second lesson in the same life. The Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) described himself as one sent as a teacher. He owned that role and named it. Every one of us who takes the title of professor is claiming a place in that lineage. It is the largest claim a Muslim scholar can make, and if a new Pakistani professor understood it fully on the day of appointment, it would be enough to live on for the rest of a working life. That claim deserves rather more than a circular from the registrar's office.

A chair is held in trust, not owned, and the trust is not the university's alone. When professors declare in public what they will answer for, they are naming a cause larger than their own professional advancement, and in this country that cause is the building of the nation itself.

The declaration, made in the spirit of what was done at Safa, turns an honour into an obligation. Let us hold our professors to it: nations are built by people who have said aloud what they owe to the nation.