This is not the first time a strict policy of disciplining and moral policing has been framed by a public sector university in Pakistan. On the contrary, it simply demonstrates the long tradition of the public sector’s obsession and paranoia around students and keeping a close eye on the extent of freedoms they can and should enjoy.
You would only need a cursory glance at major public sector universities in Lahore to understand how deep this convention of taming and disciplining university students goes. At one of the oldest institutions of this region, students are denied entry in classes if they are wearing shalwar kameez or chappals (sandals). Female students are interrogated and lectured about what they can and cannot wear. At the Punjab University, students were denied permission to go on an outstation trip (where they would be staying at the university’s own rest house) because both adult male and female students were going to be a part of the trip. At King Edward Medical University, the vice chancellor is known for personally stalking social media accounts of students and takes screenshots of everything they, and then reprimands them in class if they criticise him in their personal conversations. At most campuses, any form of collective action is demonised and met with extreme repression.
This education demonises collective action, kills creativity and innovation in the name of discipline and instils an eternal fear of repression
It feels as if our universities no longer exist as centres of innovative, scientific, and critical exploration. Rather, they have become the main apparatus for disciplining students and, through careful treatment, producing linear and undeviating minds who take life as it is being provided to them, not as they would like it to be.
In a time when universities are taking extra interest in moral and ethical disciplining of students, one would assume that they would have fulfilled their fundamental academic responsibilities, after which they would put in the extra effort. But even that is not the case.
Nobody remembers the last time a public sector university in Pakistan announced building a state-of-the-art research centre for its students, nor do can we recall which vice chancellor of a public sector university invited students to debate and discuss the affairs of the university. When was the last time any public university in Pakistan made it a priority to update courses and curriculums on the basis of critical and scientific standards? Which public sector institution last announced restructuring of its examination and bureaucratic system to facilitate students?
Did any university declare that it would raise quotas for students who come from outside of the Punjab and make sure they feel comfortable studying here? Did they ever announce that their top priority would be to establish a sexual harassment committee in order to curb sexual violence on campuses?
Which public sector university has even responded to the government’s draconian decision to cut down the education budget? Was there even any official statement over the brutal killing of either Mashal Khan or Professor Khalid Hameed?
Silence meets all these questions. But it would be unfair to say this dismal state of affairs is not exclusively a result of neglect or lack of attention. It has not been just a lack of will that has kept public sector university administrations from making radical decisions to improve campus life. It is not that these administrations or bureaucrats have remained silent and passive. They have neither been negligent to their causes nor have they lost any grip. Their project to make universities centres of national baptism and disciplining, rather than learning, is still gaining ground and reaping desired results.
The curiosity and audacity to unlearn out-dated knowledge and invent new forms of thinking is being discouraged. The power to criticise existing structures is diminishing. The ability to get together on campus to discuss and solve issues related to transport, hygiene, fee structure and curriculum is being penalised. What remains is a conscious insistence on producing an asymmetrical space, with an extra focus on how the students dress, in what language they talk and in the ways they celebrate, what they worship and who they critique. This is being done through written and unwritten notifications which prohibit students from singing, dancing, wearing what they are comfortable in and even talking in their own languages.
This education demonises collective action, kills creativity and innovation in the name of discipline and instils an eternal fear of repression or depravity in case of any deviance from the prescribed path. It treats its subjects, the students, as if they are children, or animals, who possess no rationale whatsoever to decide what is in their own best interests. Most students, ironically thinking of themselves as children, therefore, do not decide to study at universities in order to enhance their critical abilities. They do it because it offers them a suitable training that would be make them better fitting to be a part of the system, make a decent living, and essentially survive.
Public sector education is not noble anymore, as it has ceased to offer values of either truth or invention. Those who enjoy positions of power on campuses consciously hire an incompetent faculty so that their positions remain secure and no one joins the race of replacing them. The faculty, consequently, spend their times worshipping their seniors rather than comforting the students. Their brutal disciplining mechanisms are also an expression of their insecurities: when they have a complete realisation that impressing students through their ideas is impossible, they intimidate them so that their fear, rather than their respect, remains established and intact.
A direct result of this systematic incompetence is that campuses are now being effectively run by bureaucracies rather than academicians. These bureaucratic personnel even enjoy the powers to intimidate and reprimand teachers and professors at will. Those members of faculty who are actually learned and who advocate progressive ideas are condemned to work in an extremely compromising environment. The secretaries take over the registrars, the registrars take over the deans, the deans take over the faculty, and the faculty release their rage and powerlessness on students.
Students are not being disempowered and brutally disciplined because they actually do not know how to handle authority. It is because administrations know that they can, and they have. Students have taken down dictatorships in this country. They have remained at the forefront of movements who have brought up questions of class, ethnicity, gender, and now even war. These apparatuses of disciplining are nothing but mechanisms of silencing a group whose power otherwise frightens those who rule through oppression and dispossession. It is a bid to delegitimise collective political action and breed passivity. Our past haunts them, but so does our future!
The writer is a student activist