There was a time when Pakistan’s Student uniotns were places you could spot some the future political leaders in Pakistan. Sadly things have taken a turn for the worse since the late 70’s and Zia’s encouraging of armed student groups (mostly the IJT) and allowing them free rein to impose their brand of thinking on other students.
Since the ban on student Unions and Labour Unions these groups now oerate underground and totally unrestrained..case in poiint the recent killing of an history student in, Quaid-e-Azam university. Pervaiz Hoodhboy has written a piece on the subject in the Dawn. Anyone who knows any specifics on the incident please feel free to post your comments about what happened and in general about student politics in Pakistan.
The feuding tribes of students
http://www.dawn.com/2003/text/fea.htm
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
For three straight days in mid-October, Punjabi and Pakhtoon students fought a pitched battle at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. With sticks, stones, pistols, and automatic weapons they hammered away. Then, on the fourth day, one student died of gunshot wounds and the university closed down. Although classes resumed three weeks later, the fear of revenge killings continues to stalk the campus. This last murder was the fourth this year at Pakistan’s supposedly most prestigious public-sector university.
It should come as no surprise that Pakistan’s public universities are so prone to blood-letting. Even the “big names” - Punjab, Karachi, QAU - are populated by feuding tribes of students. The tribalism is not new but it was greatly accentuated by the banning of student unions over 15 years ago on grounds they brought national politics into educational institutions. Today the only student representation permitted is through ethnic and religious groups. Their hate-filled propaganda succeeds in rallying together the violent lumpen element.
Religious vigilantes are adding to intellectual desertification. On their orders, drama, theatre, and musical events are forbidden, as is any activity that can bring male and female students together. In Punjab University, which is effectively run by the Jamaat-i-Islami, males and females must sit in separate sections of the classroom. A fanatical student mob ransacked the Department of Visual Studies of Karachi University last week, destroying musical instruments, sculptures and paintings.
Religious piety is all-pervasive and evident in the burqas and beards that dominate campuses across the country. The “azan” is regularly given, even during class times, inside departments. Student activists from the universities rove the streets in Peshawar and Lahore, throwing paint on billboards showing women’s faces. Posters on stair-walls in my department instruct one about the proper prayer to use while ascending or descending.
Violence and ethnic conflict are just one manifestation of a deeper and more disturbing reality. Pakistan’s public universities are utterly barren. Apart from an occasional event, there are no seminars, colloquia, public lectures, debates, or open discussions on contemporary scientific, cultural, or political issues.
Consequently Pakistan’s universities are factories for the mass-production of “lumpen” graduates. Ignorant and uncurious, with poor reading and writing skills, incapable of coherently articulating an argument, with little sense of politics or history, this kind of student exhibits few of the qualities that one associates with a university education.
Contrary to what is generally held to be true, the intellectual impoverishment of Pakistan’s universities has very little to do with inadequacy of resources, and very much to do with inappropriate values and attitudes. And here the primary fault lies with the teachers rather than the students.
With some honourable exceptions, teachers at public universities care little about the subjects they teach, freely conveying their confusion and ignorance to students. Many admit that they never consult a textbook and choose to dictate from notes they saved from the time when they were students in that same department.
Questions in class are usually frowned upon, treated as an affront to authority. Promotions are time-bound and automatic. All teachers receive full salaries until retirement, and incompetence is the most minor of sins. I am not aware of any university teacher receiving punishment for not knowing his or her subject.
No academic staff association, or any other body of teachers, has ever demanded that entrance tests be instituted to select good students and thereby raise teaching standards, nor have penalties ever been discussed for the widespread abuse of a teacher’s power or to combat many widely practised ways of academic fraud. And yet, at a moment’s notice, armies of university teachers sally forth to “defend their rights” and defeat any new scheme that even remotely challenges the present system of their life-time free-loading.
It is absurd to think that paucity of resources lies behind the decline of the intellect in Pakistan or, for that matter, in the Islamic world. Consider mathematics and theoretical physics. The resources needed to develop these are next to zero. Nevertheless they are recognized as hardest and most rigorous disciplines to master in intellectual terms. Together they constitute the foundation of all science, the firm bedrock of scientific inquiry.
Tragically, today there is not even one Pakistani under 50 years of age, living in Pakistan, who has any degree of international recognition as a mathematician or theoretical physicist. But 30 years ago, when I started teaching at Quaid-i-Azam University, one could have counted up to 20 names across the country. This is just one indication of the fantastic decline in intellectual capabilities in Pakistan across the board.
Enter Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, appointed by General Pervez Musharraf as chairman of the Higher Education Commission and charged with reforming universities. Here is a man of considerable brilliance and dynamism. Most importantly, he has billions in cash to give.
In consequence many university departments are today awash in research funds and special incentives have been announced for Ph.D students and their supervisors. An optional tenure-track scheme for rewarding high-performing faculty has been announced, while 300 foreign faculty members are to be hired on contract at international-scale salaries.
Thirty years ago, Atta’s schemes could have worked wonders. Even today, they represent the only serious attempt at university reform in 56 years. No one else has come up with any better ideas. But the rot is now so much deeper that the outcome of any technical fix, however clever, is far from certain.
Pakistan’s violent international image drives away foreigners who may otherwise want to live in Pakistan and help transform its universities; the still dwindling number of Pakistani faculty members who can properly guide Ph.D research is now minuscule; students registered for Ph.D research (and often their supervisors!) are shockingly deficient in their basics; and private universities are tearing away the remaining good faculty from public universities. Therefore, success is likely to be partial. But Atta’s efforts still deserve our cautious support. To keep matters in perspective, the cost of his failure will surely be no greater than losing a single F-16 in an accident.
For decades there have been grandiose declarations of building MITs and Harvards in Pakistan, or at least something close to the many Indian Institutes of Technology. But these have come to naught because the most important single fact has been ignored - good universities are self-governing communities of scholars engaged in free inquiry, discovery, and transmission of knowledge. Such institutions can grow only if personal freedom and liberty are valued and respected, if the urge to innovate and experiment is rewarded rather than punished, and when a society looks towards the future rather than the distant past.
Universities lie at the heart of modern civilization, the secret behind its awesome strength. Without them we cannot hope to confront Pakistani society’s general disaffection with the scientific method, rationality and democracy. Pakistan has yet to get its first real university. Building nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and having generals run the country, is no substitute.
The writer teaches physics at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.