Vice-chancellors in KP vow to resist proposed amendments

PESHAWAR: An emergency meeting of the vice-chancellors of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa public sector universities was held on Tuesday at University of Peshawar to discuss the proposed amendments in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Universities Act 2012.
The vice-chancellors discussed the proposed amendments one by one in detail. The members expressed serious reservations over the proposed amendments in which, they claimed, the recommendations of the chancellor’s committee had been ignored.
The vice-chancellors were of the opinion that these amendments are a clear deviation from recommendations of the committee constituted by the chancellor/governor Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which would affect autonomy of the universities and jeopardize the quality of education.
They said in most of the places the government is being seen as taking away the powers of the authorities of universities which will cause damage to the good governance in the institutes of higher education.
They said that they could not approve these amendments which will bring down the quality of education in the universities which have been doing much better compared to other educational institutions.
This will be a clear deviation from the manifesto of the sitting ruling party which promised to strengthen the autonomy of the universities and improve the quality of higher education. Now other provinces are moving strongly ahead of our province and our government is bent upon taking the very autonomy of higher education institutions, they remarked.