The fierce politics of Pakistan’s academia

Sayre’s law, named for Columbia University political scientist Wallace Stanley Sayre, states that “The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.” One way that is currently playing itself out in public universities in Pakistan is in the tribes that have been created between university faculty.

In Pakistan, the hallmark of a government job that pays on the Basic Pay Scale (BPS) is that it is almost impossible to get fired, and the sense of safety and security it provides in the form of a pension. It may not pay much while in service, but if you work for the government, you and your spouse will be taken care of until both of you pass away. Like in most government jobs, promotion is conditional on a post becoming vacant. However, unlike most government jobs at that level, when a vacancy does open up, the competition for it is not confined to applicants from within the same institution but nationwide.

The result is people stuck at the same level for up to 20 years, which is unseen in most public-sector organizations. Some might argue that university faculty working on BPS contracts are unburdened by pressures of performance and may have little sympathy for complaints of slow career advancement. But consider that, generally speaking, other public-sector organizations are not exactly bursting with productivity either. Why, then, such double standards?

In the 2000s, the HEC introduced a parallel service track in academia called the Tenure Track System (TTS). It was meant to demand higher productivity of faculty, comprising mostly of the hundreds of scholarship holders returning home from abroad. The TTS offered more attractive salaries than those of their BPS peers, paid for by supplementary budgetary support from the HEC. Best of all, a faculty member on the TTS track can get promoted by meeting certain benchmarks after a certain number of years independent of available vacancies or competition, thus removing the biggest pain point BPS peers are still suffering from. Notably, though, TTS faculty does not include a pension – the monthly salary is all they get.

Over a decade later, when adjusted for inflation, the HEC has been gradually defunded, while the number of universities it is expected to support keeps growing, courtesy of provincial assemblies and parliament that keep handing out university charters. The difference in salaries that once enticed people to switch from the archaic BPS to the TTS track is now hardly noticeable.

For the last 15 years or so, TTS appointees have been envying BPS appointees their pensions, and BPS appointees have been envying their TTS peers’ clear route to promotion and the once significantly, now only marginally, higher salary. What it adds up to is mounting resentment and prickliness among the ranks. Irrespective of intention, it has had the effect of pitting colleagues against colleagues.

And this year, the HEC has finally thrown in the towel – universities have been told that the budgetary support for TTS salaries from the HEC will be no longer, leaving universities to hold the bag. Universities, which only a few years earlier urged their faculty members to move to TTS because it would bring more HEC funds to cover salaries and reduce pension obligations in the long term, are now pressuring faculty on TTS to give up their nominally higher-paying contracts and sign up for the universities’ contract, one that pays less and does not come with any pension benefits – a proposition in which faculty members are the sole losers.

According to the HEC’s 2021 data, of the 57,000 faculty members working in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), only 35 per cent of faculty are PhD qualified, while the remaining 65 per cent hold a qualification less than that. Of these, around 11,000 work for public-sector universities of which 45 per cent are on TTS while the remaining are still on BPS.

Since the introduction of the poorly thought-through TTS service structure (which has almost none of the elements associated with a “tenured” academic position) in parallel with the BPS track, its greatest accomplishment has been increasing resentment within the ranks of universities. Even now, the tinkering with service structures is not motivated by improving student learning outcomes but by a desire to address the problems resulting from introducing a half-baked reform whose fallout was predictable from the start.

What it has not accomplished is to improve the core function of universities, providing a better level of education. One could even argue that it had the opposite effect – relegating the task of (good) teaching to a nuisance and where (graduate) students exist to serve faculty in their pursuit of producing (mostly) junk papers.

Policies are made for a purpose – to increase impactful research and raise the quality of education students receive in HEIs. The bottom line is that the existing mishmash of policies and service structures in universities has failed and that is not a secret. Why, then, is it so hard to change a broken policy? In years past, when HEC chairpersons / executive directors dared contemplate revamping the TTS, this was supposedly taken as personal criticism by some authors of the original TTS and invited a rebuke to keep their ‘hands off.’

Almost every problem in the higher education sector today can be attributed to the high degree of financial dependence of most universities on the HEC and the dictation that it submits them to. Very few public universities had the foresight to start on the path to financial self-sustainability early and stuck to it. The result is that they have evolved a flexible service structure that works for them and did it relatively quickly because they did not require a national consensus across public universities any time a tweak or change is needed.

Private universities, that do not receive any public funding and, therefore, cannot be compelled to adopt the TTS, have developed their own service structures that are more responsive to changing and local market realities. Under the current TTS, if a university is located in a city with a high cost of living or is located in an unattractive or underdeveloped part of the country, public universities are limited by the rigidity of TTS / BPS scales in what they can offer. Private universities do not operate under any such constraints.

Many more public universities will have to follow the same lead to operate more independently and that cannot happen as long as someone else holds the purse strings. The HEC ought to stick to setting standards, specifying measurable metrics for universities to achieve and publish their performance against them but give universities the freedom and the responsibility to develop themselves according to whatever works in their context.

Once performance data about university programmes on meaningful metrics (cost-of-attendance, employment rate, starting salaries, etc) is public, the market of prospective students will decide which programme is worth its cost-to-students – the ones that are not will wither.

The writer (she/her) has a PhD in Education.