Corporatising universities

Corporatising universities in Pakistan reflects failure on the part of the state, on the part of society at large.

We have seen an abnormal growth in the number of private universities in Pakistan over the past two decades, offering formula-type undergraduate programmes. The owner of some of these universities started them without charters and ran them as business for years, which helped them accumulate enough resources and clout to buy political influence to get charters from the assemblies. Starting from a rented house or two, some of these universities have built up their campuses and have tens of thousands of students enrolled from bachelor to doctors of philosophy level. Is this strange or welcome?

Some would argue that owners of such private universities offered an opportunity for the youth that was not impressed with the standards of the public universities or couldn’t get into the degree programmes of their choice. From this point of view, private investment in higher education is a sort of public service done at a time when the public universities faced resource constraints.This is a shallow reasoning, justifies greed, selfishness and profiteering from poor public investment in education.

Such education for profit has confused the public in Pakistan in terms of what the relationship between the university and society should be, in an age when everything in the hands of the government is rotting, including public education. This confusion along with the spread of neo-liberalism — privatisation, deregulation and a market economy —has helped pave the way for those setting up colleges without following proper requirements by paving the way for education for profit. Let me expose a big lie first. No respectable university in the world is established or run for profit.

Prestigious private universities in the United States like Columbia, Harvard, along with so many others, are non-profit and have large endowments. Philanthropic foundations, individuals, businesses, government departments for research and alumnae support these universities. Also, they have built up investments that sustain them along with the fees that they charge. No person, no company takes any profit except salaries for work.

Universities are public trusts and cannot be considered as business corporations as they are in Pakistan where greedy individuals, business families, some of them socially and political powerful, run them as such. From among close to a hundred such universities and colleges, there are only three in my knowledge — Aga Khan University, LUMS and Namal (Mianwali) that operate on a non-profit basis, essentially as philanthropic, charitable institutions. The rest of them are family businesses or have profit-taking owners and partners.

Corporatising universities in Pakistan, shameful as it is, reflects two major failures, one on the part of the state, and the other on the part of society at large. The Pakistani state for long has had messed-up priorities — borrowing more rather than taxing the rich, spending more on security than development etc. Similarly, public universities have remained poorly governed for too long, have lacked adequate funding from governments and have had unreflective leadership with some exceptions. Yet another failure was the poor regulation of private universities by the Higher Education Commission, a controversial white elephant. Sadly, the HEC bosses have never understood the philosophy of the private university as a community-owned, community-funded organisation.

The failure of the society is in not according true value to higher learning — mainly secular, scientific and technological learning, and in the humanities, including religion, in the university setting. Let us turn to history. It is the university in the modern world funded by the government and society that has led to progress and not corporatisation of education at any level, let alone higher education.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 12^th, 2011.