Who needs higher education?

The higher academic community, protesting cuts in funding for higher education, is simply not getting it. Since when was higher education, or indeed any education for that matter, a priority in the Islamic Republic? We have been into other things: the greater glory of the faith, turning Pakistan into a citadel of Islam, etc. But education? Perish the thought.
Finance Minister Hafeez Shaikh and education specialist (my friend) Shehnaz Wazir Ali have asked universities to raise their own funds by disposing off their surplus land. A better idea has not been mooted.
They should go a step further and encourage universities to set up shopping malls and give franchises to McDonald's, KFC and the like. Why stop at this? Theme parks could also be set up. This is ingenuity or, what business wizards call, thinking out of the box.
The only good thing about the Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad is the precious real estate on which it sits. A few multi-storey structures could house the academic blocks while the rest of the land more profitably could be turned into a housing colony. Real estate is the one thing at which we have excelled. Even the army's primary expertise is now in this field.
What Punjab University Lahore really deserves is to be given in perpetual lease to the Jamaat-e-Islami. For all practical purposes it is already an extension of the Jamaat. Leasehold rights would only confer de jure status on a de facto reality. Fie on the thought that the cause of education will suffer. It cannot suffer more than it already has.
About Karachi University not much can be said. Its fate cannot be much different, for better or worse, than the fate which has befallen Karachi. We have two types of Taliban in this country: the faith-driven Taliban of the frontier territories and the secular Taliban of Karachi. If, in extremity, one were given a choice of whose hands to fall into it would be a tough decision to make. A razor to the throat, the preferred method of the warriors of the faith, or the alternative, the tender mercies of a drill machine to the knees? We need to redefine the meaning of education in Pakistan.
Pakistan's most effective vice chancellor at present is Qari Hussain, Ustad-e-fidayeen, head of the Taliban's academy of suicide bombers. But the educationists of Karachi, who have opened up an entirely new field of knowledge with their skill in the use of the drill machine, are not far behind.
Our business schools, LUMS, IBA, etc, are said to be good. But if the mess we have made of the economy is a measure of the usefulness of these schools, we are probably better off without them. If the only economic wizards we can produce are those who can wreck the economy further, then clearly we have to look for other routes to the summit.
We have to get the right perspective of things. Pakistan has a president who if he ever went to college went to one with its address unknown. It has a law minister, the most voluble member of a cabinet whose size wouldn't fit in a baggage train, who holds a doctorate of philosophy in jurisprudence, I think, from a Montecello University which was debarred by a proper edict of the concerned authorities some years ago from issuing any kind of degree. Yet he continues to call himself a doctor and is not in the least embarrassed by the snide remarks occasionally made about his academic accomplishments.
And Pakistan has a National Defence University whose rector serves at the pleasure of the army chief. Through a statute of parliament the NDU has been granted the privilege of issuing master's degrees and conferring doctorates of philosophy (the law minister should have his updated from there). Which makes the army about self-sufficient in the matter of higher education, as it already is in so many other departments of national life, real estate included.
Lest anyone be under the impression that the NDU produces a steady stream of von Moltkes, senior officers equally at home in military and intellectual matters, the NDU's primary function seems to be to confirm senior officers in their ingrained mental attitudes. When they get a degree they can be forgiven for thinking that they have voyaged across the seas and have finally arrived at the shores of knowledge.
The cut in higher education spending has been to the tune of ten billion rupees, which is really small change in these inflation-hit times. But then what did the professors expect? Were they seriously thinking that if the federal government wanted money saved it should have cut defence spending, or federal government extravagance in other spheres?
The allocation for science and technology has been cut, despite vehement and futile protests from the minister concerned, Azam Swati. Now we have higher education being taken to the cleaners. Which are as things should be.
As I can't emphasise too much, we are into other things: the safeguarding of ideology, whatever that may be, the eradication of vice and the promotion of virtue, with our own definitions of vice and virtue. Where does education fit into this scheme of things?
The Taliban had no use for education in their Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. In the ideological state which we started constructing soon after 1947, the Objectives Resolution having laid the foundations of this grand design, heavy investment in education never figured as a national priority. The Prophet, peace be upon him, ordained that to seek knowledge travel to China if you must. Our China has been the yoke of national security at whose altar we have sacrificed every other consideration.
We say we haven't attained the holy grail of political stability in our 63 years of existence. Forget about stability, it can wait. With Zardari as president, Gilani as prime minister, the army spreading its wings, anchor persons (Allah be praised) trying to set the national agenda, the Pir of Pagara taken seriously as a latter-day Oracle of Delphi, and the Supreme Court smarting under the impression that it can't get its rulings implemented, we will get stability soon enough. In 63 years we haven't been able to put together a common education policy for the country.
In fact we haven't given the time of day to this problem. Largely because our multiple education system -- English for the sahibs and their offspring, Urdu for the masses -- serves the elites just fine. English being the language of power and government, English-medium schools give the better-off classes a clear head-start when it comes to jobs and related matters. The system of entitlement which is our dominant culture is underpinned by this apartheid in education.
So the professors are really climbing up the wrong tree. The elites have access to the kind of education they want. As for what we call the people, the awam, they are the cheerleaders of democracy, fodder for the political parties, the subject matter of the most fiery slogans. But Pakistan as we know it is for the privilegentsia. It was never for the masses and never will be because the gap between high and low, rich and poor, instead of shrinking is now as wide as the Arabian Sea.
Lest I forget, let me recall this vignette from a youth conference at Al-Hamra in Lahore presided over by Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif. The first section of the hall as soon as you entered was reserved for officials. In the front row sat a claque of provincial secretaries. Relegated to the fifth or sixth row was the Vice Chancellor of the Fatima Jinnah University, Professor Doctor Saeeda Asadullah Khan. This was strictly according to the correct order of merit and protocol in the Islamic Republic.
Did the chief minister recite Habib Jalib? I think he did, he being a great one for poetry, especially of the revolutionary kind. But the vice chancellor's presence in the fifth or sixth row escaped his eagle attention.
What change in the country are we talking about? Will this order of things change? Will the meek inherit the earth? Will the dispossessed come into their own? I won't even try to answer these questions.

Email: winlust@yahoo.com