Stand up, universities

Our students are certainly worthy of best institutions. We have yet to prove whether institutions are worthy of them

The demand, they say, is at an all-time high. The admission rates, the bragging commodity of universities, are at an all-time low. Yet, in the court of public opinion, there is agreement that the promise of higher education in the country has not materialised. While there is a clear correlation between more opportunities, better pay and higher education, the sentiment on the street is that higher education has failed to deliver.

While there is little doubt that strong institutions are inevitable for growth and development, there may be some truth to the argument about failure. Our institutions of higher education are not playing the role in nation-building that they ought to play. Intolerance is growing on campus, just as it is gnawing away at the last thread of our social fabric. The administrators themselves are lacking the vision for any change in the status quo.

Our universities today are facing a two-fold challenge, one from the outside and one from within. If they are to stay relevant, administrators, educators and students, all need to show the resolve to ride these storms. Otherwise, they will be no more relevant than the Pakistan Railways.

First is the challenge from the outside. The Higher Education Commission (HEC), an organisation with a great vision and promise back in the day, is not only becoming increasingly irrelevant due to its financial constraints and mismanagement, but is also becoming highly destructive to the system it is supposed to create and safeguard. The HEC has no business of dictating universities regarding what activities should or should not be allowed on campus, what debates are authorised and what are forbidden. It needs to create an atmosphere to foster dialogue, to create platforms for tolerance — not micromanage institutions to become bastions of intolerance. Here, university administrators, instructors and students need to take a single, unified and collective stance in telling the HEC to back off. The HEC, like every other institution, must lend its ears to constructive criticism, and it is much better that it comes from the key stakeholders in education and not politicians who proudly flaunt their illiteracy.

The second challenge, perhaps a much bigger one, is from within the institutions. Universities, across the world, and most recently in the US, have started to take a deep and hard look at issues of harassment on their campuses. The US initiative is pushed by the president himself after a surge in poorly managed cases of sexual harassment and rape on campuses. There are now sweeping reforms across campuses in dealing with harassment, in a way that is redefining student life and experience.

Female students and minorities in Pakistan have to fight unimaginable barriers, stigmas and injustice at every stage and station of their education. Our conscience should not allow this to continue. Universities in Pakistan need to start comprehensive self-reflection to understand the depth and breadth of the problem. Starting with anonymous surveys that, while protecting privacy, allow students to share any instance of harassment they have experienced on campus, be it based on gender, religion, ethnicity or any other factor, should be instituted immediately. The goal is not to defame an individual institution, but to find broad and specific trends that can be addressed comprehensively and immediately. Whether the perpetrator is another student, a group, a teacher or a staff member, a healthy institution has no place for harassment of any kind against anyone. To date, no such systematic structure of data collection exists on our campuses. Like with everything else, we somehow assume all is well and any instance proving the opposite is deemed to be due to an unstable individual. What the universities may find, should they bother to collect data, is actually a culture of harassment and an ecosystem of misogyny. Steps to correct that will show both character and resolve, something we should aspire for. Not all is gloom and doom in the world of universities in Pakistan. The input into the system is as good as anywhere else in the world. Our students are certainly worthy of the best institutions. We have yet to prove whether the institutions are worthy of them.

Universities need to rise, for justice, for fairness and above all, for themselves.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 11^th, 2014.

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