A most predictable coup

As certain as thunder accompanies rain, like water floods the plain, and like Trump rolled over on Ukraine, just as certainly the bureaucracy always seeks to extend its influence over, and eventually control, any entity that lacks the power to resist. It is a law of Physics! Two enabling factors have been pushing the encroachment of politicians and bureaucracy into universities.

The first factor is if an entity of the government is delivering on its given objectives, few dare interfere in its operations, especially if that entity is in view of the public. Conversely, when an entity is not delivering, that gives government and/or bureaucracies (federal or provincial) the perfect excuse to encroach on it in the name of ‘reform’.

Whether they admit it to themselves or not, people in universities — barring very few exceptions — have known for quite a while that the impact of making all universities chase imperfect and gameable metrics of research output has been next to nothing. Various country-wise studies on the rate of retraction of research papers for integrity issues often feature Pakistan among the top 5.

The shift in university priorities to simple publication metrics developed a culture of junk publications, about which much has been written already. It also came at the cost of deprioritising effort and quality of teaching. In this way, students (particularly undergraduates), who ought to be the principal stakeholders in the functioning of a university, were relegated to an afterthought at best or near-free labour in service of producing more junk publications.

Most universities do not distinguish themselves by the positive outcomes their programmes deliver for their graduates. Talk to a founder of a domestic tech start-up and everyone shares the same complaint about the great challenge of finding enough hireable graduates with a sound understanding of the fundamentals of their field of study, even 25 years after jumping on the global IT/technology education bandwagon.

The second factor is that if you are paying for something, you own it, you get to run it, you get to call the shots.

The federal government’s budget allocation for current expenditures of higher education has been effectively locked in place since 2017, at around Rs65 billion. Provinces have been prodded to take responsibility for funding their own universities, but such pressures on the system are best applied slowly and gradually. Despite repeated prodding, provinces continued to rely on federal funds to run their universities while keeping their own contributions in the range between nothing and pitiful (with the notable exception of Sindh).

Fast-forward seven years to 2024, and the early version of the federal budget for 2024-25 had cut the recurrent budget by about half with the message that provinces would be responsible for funding their own universities going forward. The decision was reversed and the higher education budget was restored to the figure it had been frozen at for years.

A few days ago, the federal minister of planning reportedly officially conveyed to the chairman of planning and development in Punjab that from next year, federal funding for universities will only match provinces’ contributions — if provinces allocate very little, they will receive equally little from the federal government. Going forward, the message to provinces is that federal support for higher education will be severely curtailed.

Even though the direction of travel of federal contribution to higher education in provinces has been telegraphed ahead for years, few public universities have taken serious steps to mobilise to achieve greater financial sustainability. Many vice-chancellors who came up as academics still consider themselves researchers first and treat talk about budgets and financial realities of the institutions they are responsible for as ‘unscholarly’ and distasteful.

Most continue to refuse to explore building endowment funds, developing their alumni networks and soliciting donations and philanthropic contributions but also continue to rely on the allocation of public funds. Unwillingness to accept reality and adapt to changed realities has brought many public universities to the brink of insolvency, putting them months behind on payment of salaries and pensions to current and former staff.

This is where things presently stand — both factors are in play and put together it is no longer a matter of if but when the bureaucracy will get around to making its way into universities. Politicians have realised that they will now pay for universities from their provincial budgets and that control of universities gives them the ability to hand out cushy jobs to people in their orbit who need to be rewarded for their services.

Professor Richard Dawkins coined the word ‘meme’ in his 1976 book ‘The Selfish Gene’. The word refers to any idea, behaviour, or practice that, like a gene, is passed from one generation to the next (mixing, mutating, and evolving) while being in competition with other memes in which only the best will survive. Of course, in recent years the term has taken on another meaning in pop culture.

The idea of chief ministers and provincial bureaucracies taking over control of their public universities was being tossed around in Punjab as early as 2020. Wherever the idea started, but like a strong meme, since then it has spread to all provinces. As provinces will be increasingly footing more of their costs, now has been determined to be the right time to make moves.

Last year, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa passed an amendment to its universities act that has empowered the chief minister to appoint VCs, and allow greater bureaucratic control of universities and political interference, trickling down to appointments of registrars, deans, etc. VCs will effectively report to a provincial secretary. For precedent, they cited Sindh, where the CM is vested with chancellorship, and Balochistan, where a similar proposal is also on the table.

Sindh’s amendment to its Universities Act went further to ease the entry of bureaucrats into the VC office. Punjab’s higher education bureaucracy is proposing to confer the responsibility of chairing the syndicate (universities’ statutory body) on the CM, instead of the VC, and let the secretary of the higher education department chair in the absence of the CM/minister.

In the last three years, the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training has amended the ordinance governing the Higher Education Commission twice — not to improve the quality of higher education, but to undermine the autonomy of the regulator. They have even toyed with the idea of making the minister of federal education the chancellor of federal universities where the law does not allow it.

The details of this power grab may differ somewhat from one province to another, but they share the same contours. I was recently asked why all this is happening and I think the answer is quite simple: Because conditions are such that a coup can be performed without much resistance, because public universities are not distinguishing themselves in the way they are performing and because there are too many goodies and spoils at stake to pass on.

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