QAU faculty members concerned about syndicate meeting agenda

Islamabad
The faculty members at Quaid-i-Azam University expressed dismay and anxiety over the reports that the forthcoming Syndicate meeting on Thursday (today) is considering a proposal thereby restricting the 65-year retiring age already granted by the Syndicate in April last to only for the categories of Tenured Professor in TTS and Professor Meritorious in BPS categories.
According to reliable sources, the circulated agenda contains a proposal through which the QAU vice-chancellor desired that instead of enhancing retirement age to 65 for the whole faculty, the facility should be accorded to only Tenured Professors and Professors Meritorious.
It may be mentioned that after the induction of Tenure Track System in 2007, no appointment of Professor Meritorious, a BPS 22 post, had been made at QAU.
There is not a single teacher to benefit from this “largesse” of the administration in BPS system at the moment.
The suggestion also fixes Rs1.5 lakh per month salary with Rs10,000 annual increment. It is like converting the job to a contractual appointment, said a BPS professor. Another lecturer said that it does not happen in the rest of the world including South Asia like India, Sri Lanka and BD where the retiring age was straight away increased from 60 to 65 years across the board more than a decade ago.
The age issue was raised in 2013 for the first time in Syndicate and the university was asked to place it formally in the next meeting which was held in October last. Instead of presenting the case, the administration set up a committee only one week before the Syndicate meeting. Hence the committee could not process it in such a short time. The Syndicate asked QAU to circulate the case by Dec 31, 2014, which it could not do either. In the following meeting on April 30, 2015, it approved it for all the teaches retiring after the next fiscal, i.e, July 1, 2015.
The committee had proposed enhancing retiring age for faculty members across the board without discrimination. It, however, recommended barring post-60-year teachers to hold HoD or Dean’s positions so that students can benefit from their teaching and research experiences.