Over the last many years, campus protests and closings have become a recurring feature of life at Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU). Night-time clashes in October 2024 made headlines for gunfire, left some hostel rooms torched, and dozens of students injured.
Then, in May, June and July, illegally operating ‘ethnic councils’ (read: campus gangs) led protests that disrupted teaching and learning for a few weeks, delaying the conclusion of the spring semester.
Ordinarily, after the spring semester, QAU conducts a summer semester. In the summer semester, students have the option to take courses from a limited offering. This gives students who have failed courses during the two regular semesters the opportunity to repeat those courses and pass before the next academic year.
In the past, around 10-15 per cent of students availed themselves of this opportunity. However, this year QAU cancelled the summer semester, citing the delayed conclusion of the preceding semester and likely due to a dearth of funds to pay faculty taking on the extra teaching load (teaching during the summer is not considered part of regular duties). QAU’s financial situation has been so dire that the government just approved a bailout package of Rs2 billion so that the university can pay off accrued liabilities.
This is when matters got heated. Since there was no longer a reason for anyone to occupy the university’s hostels over the summer, the administration gave resident students a week’s notice to vacate the premises by July 13, citing overdue maintenance work. Scheduling facilities maintenance during the summer is a widely followed practice at universities around the world. Other reasons for vacating campus accommodations over the summer include saving on energy costs, rather than keeping large buildings sparsely occupied and operational. Yet another reason is to regularly dislodge residents, reallocate rooms and prevent anyone from becoming a permanent occupant. This was the unstated objective of clearing hostels: for administration to regain control over its student housing facilities.
However, cancelling the summer semester and vacating hostels completely has not been a regular practice at QAU for many years. That is why the notice to vacate hostels at a week’s notice caught students by surprise and led to the third major protest in this academic year, ending in the arrests of over 50 students by the Islamabad Capital Police on July 29. Even if the university had a legitimate reason to adopt the practice of vacating hostels over the summer, such dates are announced well in advance, at the start of the academic year, not a week before.
The administration's writ in university hostels ranges from partial to non-existent. Several student-created ethnic councils, with no official standing, dominate hostels, control room allocations and decide who stays and who doesn’t. So complete is the university administration’s surrender that ethnic councils do their construction in hostels to add capacity at their whim. Although explicitly against regulations, over a hundred students have installed air conditioners and other appliances in their rooms. Without a submetering system on campus, the unsanctioned and uncontrolled use of electricity contributes to the university’s total electricity usage.
QAU charges hostel residents a flat fee of around Rs30,000 a semester that includes utilities. It is significantly subsidised and a fraction of what some other public universities running their student housing on a non-profit, non-loss basis charge.
Located only a few minutes away from the heart of Islamabad, QAU’s hostel accommodation is a massive bargain for a single individual studying and /or working in Islamabad (the same is true for faculty housing). It has become a common practice among MSc students residing in university hostels in Islamabad to delay submitting their dissertation reports for years to remain registered students and continue living virtually rent-free in the city.
It may seem tempting to lay most of the blame on students’ feet, but the root cause for a lot of issues many universities face is governance failure, not just at the level of the university, but at the level of the federal and respective provincial governments that enable university governance through acts of parliament. The continued presence of unrecognised ethnic councils, universities’ persistent resistance to allowing legitimate student representation as part of their governance structure, are all symptoms of that failure. In the case of the QAU, this failure is especially glaring.
University administrations/syndicates are overseen by their senates -- essential governing bodies that exist, in part, to hold vice-chancellors accountable. However, for decades, QAU has been operating without a university senate as required by its original act. Revival of its senate is not a panacea that will fix all governance problems -- plenty of universities have a functioning senate but continue to suffer from dysfunction -- but it will be one more step towards reintroducing a measure of accountability. Its effectiveness will be determined by the intent of its members, headed by the president of Pakistan as the chancellor of federal universities, including external and internal members, including student representatives. If the senate has a clear understanding of the university’s future, it will steer it in that direction by setting KPIs for the university administration against which its performance will be measured. Without it, expecting that the executive (including the syndicate) will hold itself accountable is fanciful thinking.
In the absence of a senate, the responsibility for holding university administrators to account for this falls on elected representatives and the education bureaucracy, which are represented in university syndicates. Universities are not following the laws they are subject to, and no one bothers to ask why.
Granting students the right to have legitimate and accountable student representatives can act as a counterbalance to these ethnic councils, as reaffirmed by the Supreme Court of Pakistan, and which I have been calling for (‘Of unions and wordplay’, Dawn, January 25, 2025). Denying officially recognised representation that is inclusive of all students, that does not discriminate on ethnic or political lines, is what drives even the ‘apolitical’ students towards the situation we have now. To make matters worse, administrators lend legitimacy to ethnic councils by engaging with them in behind-the-scenes negotiations when it suits them. University administrations are failing to follow their own regulations.
Universities’ primary goal is to deliver education, but their acts also include providing student housing facilities as part of their responsibilities. Universities are not, certainly ought not to be, in the business of providing subsidised housing for both faculty and students, not in a thriving city. If they are unable to manage hostels, they should consider exiting the student housing business.
There are plenty of faults to be found in operations, management and oversight of public universities, but there is also a need to counsel students. Students have the right to speak up and support causes bigger than themselves, but that right is not absolute and does not extend to denying others (who may not share their views or feel as strongly about them) from pursuing their education. That is not a license to organise and discriminate on ethnic lines, to indulge in violence, to refuse to adhere to the code of conduct they agreed to, to occupy university facilities for years, to engage in arson, power theft and to prevent fellow students from continuing their education.
As adults, they are responsible for their actions. If they miss classes, they will have to make up for them. If their actions lead to the suspension of teaching, it may extend the semester, delay exams and reduce the time available for a summer semester. This could potentially lead to its cancellation entirely and, for final year students, delays in graduation, as has occurred this year.
I spoke to a university administrator of one of the best public universities in Pakistan and what they said perfectly sums up this issue: The lack of maturity, the inability to think rationally and behave reasonably, is where the parents and the education system in this country have completely failed a majority of its students and have failed them for many generations to come.
At the end of every day, university staff go home. At the end of the month, they get paid, irrespective of suspended classes, protests or other disruptions to campus life. Students are the ones with the most to lose and need to recognise when they are shooting themselves in the foot. On the other hand, does the federal government have the will to fix the university that was once the boast of Islamabad? I have yet to see any supporting evidence of that.
The writer (she/her) has a PhD in Education.
Disclaimer: The writer is a member of Quaid-e-Azam University’s syndicate. All facts cited in this op-ed have been reported on and are public information.
