On April 13, academic and youth activist Dr Ammar Ali Jan was sacked from the University of the Punjab. Jan, who has a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, came to his office on that fateful day without knowing that he had been dismissed and found the door locked. When he asked around, he was told that he was encouraging his students to become “needlessly” vocal about various issues on campus and beyond and was asked to disengage from the university.
His sacking came as a surprise to many. Students from across Lahore and academics from all over the worked objected to this and issued statements in solidarity with him. Even Noam Chomsky spoke out against curtailing academic freedoms at universities in Pakistan. Jan’s students also staged a demonstration, where they chanted slogans against the university administration and demanded his reinstatement.
The anomaly is not that Jan was sacked. The anomaly is the presence of an academic of such credentials at a public sector university. This is not the first time an academic has been kept from nurturing critical consciousness among their students. Private universities might offer a little breathing room but the public sector universities continue to frown upon a critical discourse. Public sector institutions today work on the principle of anti-democratisation, whereby students are not only kept in the dark regarding contradictions of our society, but any sort of activity aimed at changing the world for the better is demonised.
Ammar’s sacking, therefore, can help us understand the dystopia that is public sector education in Pakistan. Apart from the problems regarding its insistence on active depoliticisation, the public sector’s fundamental contradiction lies in its infrastructural inefficiency.
Last year, out of 1,67,131 students who passed matriculation in Lahore, only around 60,000 were accommodated in public universities. This means that a staggering amount of more than 100,000 students were left at the mercy of private institutions that most of them cannot even afford.
Moreover, for the 120 million youth living in the country, there are a total of 163 universities, out of which 94 are public. This means that if all the youth were to get higher education, every public sector university would have to accommodate approximately more than 120,000 students. It is not only unfortunate, rather scary, that for a public sector going through such a major crisis, the priority is not to deal with the infrastructural problems, but to fire perhaps the best faculty member they can get.
There is also a demographic factor within this infrastructural contradiction. For instance, out of these 94, seven universities are in Balochistan. This not only points to a fundamental crisis of disproportionate development but also acts as a cause of a wide range of problems for people belonging to the peripheries.
A large number of students from Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit Baltistan therefore have no choice but to come to the Punjab to for higher education.
Here, we find that they are seldom given the space they deserve and the public sector generally greets them by subjecting them to structural discrimination, racial profiling and maltreatment. In the name of hyper-securitization after the APS attack, walls of universities were raised and strict security policies were adopted without careful consideration of the power dynamics between people belonging to different provinces.
This made the issue of racial profiling more problematic as the identity of a terrorist was fundamentally appropriated with Pashtoon identity which increased ethnic tensions across public spaces and campuses in Lahore.
What the government did not do is to stop nurturing extremist organisations within the campus who have for years used violence to legitimise their power and have thus been the torchbearers of racial and religious bias within campuses. The demand of abolishing quotas for various ethnic groups coming from an organization after its recent clash with the Pashtuns only shows that raising walls did not actually solve the problem. It is, at best, just been an appropriate metaphor.
What is most astonishing about this crisis is how the government responds to this predicament. On the ethnic front, the response was to arrest more than 200 students and to charge them under the Anti-Terrorism Act, which in turn escalated the problem as students from across Lahore took to the streets to register their protest. Nothing substantial has also been done to solve the infrastructure problem other than the fact that now the government has allocated around Rs35 billion to Higher Education Commission’s budget which, according to the government’s own statistics, is not a lot more than the budget of the Lahore Metro Bus. For a country’s education sector to have nearly the same budget as a single city’s transport project is absurd, to say the very least. The government has also failed to make campuses follow the elaborate anti-harassment guidelines of the HEC, due to which a majority of female students across campuses are not only harassed by the faculty, but also don’t feel empowered enough to fight it through to the end. The harassment committees are either not present or are inactive or sometimes male-dominated. Students in Pakistan are forced to live under an education system that lacks adequate infrastructure, that lets extremist organisations carry out their actions in campuses in broad daylight, that breeds racial bias among various ethnicities, that lets faculty harass female students without any fear, and above all, that criminalises students if they dare to speak about it.
Ammar’s sacking is an extension of our draconian tradition of silencing those who speak against injustice, violence and oppression. In times where the public sector education is going through such a crisis, it only adds fuel to fire when it continues to consciously demonise politics on campus and uses force to stop students from raising their voices about things that matter.
Firing a rare sane voice among thousands is only the Punjab University’s loss rather than Ammar’s. There can be no solution to this crisis unless campuses are democratised and students are empowered to make decisions about the nature of education they need. Until that happens, the public sector needs to stop acting like a child. It needs to encourage minds that raise critical faculties, rather than sacking them.
His sacking came as a surprise to many. Students from across Lahore and academics from all over the worked objected to this and issued statements in solidarity with him. Even Noam Chomsky spoke out against curtailing academic freedoms at universities in Pakistan. Jan’s students also staged a demonstration, where they chanted slogans against the university administration and demanded his reinstatement.
The anomaly is not that Jan was sacked. The anomaly is the presence of an academic of such credentials at a public sector university. This is not the first time an academic has been kept from nurturing critical consciousness among their students. Private universities might offer a little breathing room but the public sector universities continue to frown upon a critical discourse. Public sector institutions today work on the principle of anti-democratisation, whereby students are not only kept in the dark regarding contradictions of our society, but any sort of activity aimed at changing the world for the better is demonised.
For a country's education sector to have nearly the same budget as a single city's transport project is absurd
Ammar’s sacking, therefore, can help us understand the dystopia that is public sector education in Pakistan. Apart from the problems regarding its insistence on active depoliticisation, the public sector’s fundamental contradiction lies in its infrastructural inefficiency.
Last year, out of 1,67,131 students who passed matriculation in Lahore, only around 60,000 were accommodated in public universities. This means that a staggering amount of more than 100,000 students were left at the mercy of private institutions that most of them cannot even afford.
Moreover, for the 120 million youth living in the country, there are a total of 163 universities, out of which 94 are public. This means that if all the youth were to get higher education, every public sector university would have to accommodate approximately more than 120,000 students. It is not only unfortunate, rather scary, that for a public sector going through such a major crisis, the priority is not to deal with the infrastructural problems, but to fire perhaps the best faculty member they can get.
There is also a demographic factor within this infrastructural contradiction. For instance, out of these 94, seven universities are in Balochistan. This not only points to a fundamental crisis of disproportionate development but also acts as a cause of a wide range of problems for people belonging to the peripheries.
A large number of students from Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit Baltistan therefore have no choice but to come to the Punjab to for higher education.
Here, we find that they are seldom given the space they deserve and the public sector generally greets them by subjecting them to structural discrimination, racial profiling and maltreatment. In the name of hyper-securitization after the APS attack, walls of universities were raised and strict security policies were adopted without careful consideration of the power dynamics between people belonging to different provinces.
This made the issue of racial profiling more problematic as the identity of a terrorist was fundamentally appropriated with Pashtoon identity which increased ethnic tensions across public spaces and campuses in Lahore.
What the government did not do is to stop nurturing extremist organisations within the campus who have for years used violence to legitimise their power and have thus been the torchbearers of racial and religious bias within campuses. The demand of abolishing quotas for various ethnic groups coming from an organization after its recent clash with the Pashtuns only shows that raising walls did not actually solve the problem. It is, at best, just been an appropriate metaphor.
What is most astonishing about this crisis is how the government responds to this predicament. On the ethnic front, the response was to arrest more than 200 students and to charge them under the Anti-Terrorism Act, which in turn escalated the problem as students from across Lahore took to the streets to register their protest. Nothing substantial has also been done to solve the infrastructure problem other than the fact that now the government has allocated around Rs35 billion to Higher Education Commission’s budget which, according to the government’s own statistics, is not a lot more than the budget of the Lahore Metro Bus. For a country’s education sector to have nearly the same budget as a single city’s transport project is absurd, to say the very least. The government has also failed to make campuses follow the elaborate anti-harassment guidelines of the HEC, due to which a majority of female students across campuses are not only harassed by the faculty, but also don’t feel empowered enough to fight it through to the end. The harassment committees are either not present or are inactive or sometimes male-dominated. Students in Pakistan are forced to live under an education system that lacks adequate infrastructure, that lets extremist organisations carry out their actions in campuses in broad daylight, that breeds racial bias among various ethnicities, that lets faculty harass female students without any fear, and above all, that criminalises students if they dare to speak about it.
Ammar’s sacking is an extension of our draconian tradition of silencing those who speak against injustice, violence and oppression. In times where the public sector education is going through such a crisis, it only adds fuel to fire when it continues to consciously demonise politics on campus and uses force to stop students from raising their voices about things that matter.
Firing a rare sane voice among thousands is only the Punjab University’s loss rather than Ammar’s. There can be no solution to this crisis unless campuses are democratised and students are empowered to make decisions about the nature of education they need. Until that happens, the public sector needs to stop acting like a child. It needs to encourage minds that raise critical faculties, rather than sacking them.