THERE might be people wondering how nice it is to be a professor in Pakistan. Let me burst that iconic bubble for such souls. For those of us on the Tenure Track System (TTS) in the country, it is more like waiting for rain in a drought; no salary increase, but higher taxes in every budget; budget after budget.

After getting through highly reputed Western academic platforms where people spend the best part of their lives in labs, seminars and workshops, satisfying all relevant criteria to achieve highest academic standards, they return to Pakistan, leaving many lucrative available opportunities behind.

Here, they spend years, nay, decades, slaving away in the hallowed halls of academia, jumping through each bure- aucratic hoop like a circus animal, all in pursuit of that coveted brass ring: tenure. They sacrifice social life, and even sanity while navigating the treacherous waters of academic politics by backstabbing colleagues who would not hesitate to throw them under the bus for a chance at that cushy, tenured position.

Those under the TTS are supposed to be the intellectual elite. However, their paycheques make them look more like paupers than professors. It is as if the government thinks they can survive on a steady diet of compliments as well as academic prestige alone. This is not all, though. The Higher Education Commission (HEC) loves to make things more convoluted, as it has now introduced a new version of TTS, which, according to the All-Pakistan Tenure Track Association (APTTA), is a slap in the face of the entire TTS faculty.

Besides, another twisted HEC tool is the Higher Education Journal Recognition System (HJRS), which is a cruel joke played on academics nationwide. The only way to measure their worth is by reducing the life’s work to a series of numbers and rankings. Academics must be judged on their actual contributions to society or the impact they have had on their students’ lives. It is an open secret that the HEC’s journal ranking policy is a money-making machine for those enjoying patronage, producing predatory journals and making it difficult for genuine academics to survive in the nasty game of publish or perish. The policy is an utter sham in the name of academic productivity.

Dr Imran Sabir
Islamabad

Published in Dawn, July 8th, 2024