THE Punjab government is worried about higher education in the province. But why ask for a ‘Higher Education Commission’, parallel to the ‘Higher Education Department’ instead of initiating reforms?

The confusion arises from an interchange of terms between the school and higher education levels. The Punjab Higher Education Department focuses on colleges, which, from an international perspective, are higher secondary schools and, technically, not part of higher education today. Intermediate-level colleges in Lahore should, thus, be administratively separated from the universities to which they are still attached, and classified as schools.

Several institutions argue they are known primarily by the reputation of their colleges; why surrender their history and prestige now? Such logic challenges the integrity and merit of universities seemingly building their names not through coursework or their response to social and economic circumstances, but by the marks students of matriculation bring to them.

Universities also depend on their attached colleges for a regular supply of students — not just the stars, but also those less gifted academically, who give up dreams of engineering or medical careers and return for a degree in the arts or some science. Is this what seats of higher learning are about — becoming second choices for MBBS and BS Engineering degrees, unable to attract diligent students from schools everywhere?

Provincial higher education bodies must concern themselves with such debates and understand that universities are insured against decay not by moral policing or backup enrolment, but by safeguarding the academic freedom of educators and research students, boosting new knowledge and discourse.

But at one of Lahores oldest and most prestigious colleges, now a university, poor management practices go unquestioned every day. Short-staffed and underfunded, departments feel compelled to burden instructors with classwork exceeding HEC-recommended hours or those allocated in competing universities.

Only a few departments have autonomy in decision-making; others are forced to rely on visiting faculty or research assistants to meet teaching gaps.

Hardworking instructors are too exhausted to tend to research papers without which a promotion slips further away. Competing for research grants and projects as a public university employee is hardly a concept. After years of struggling with nearly four lectures a day, most instructors are resigned to a life without conferences, journal submissions or the joy of discovery for which people in more advanced countries become academics. Their jaded attitudes are reflected in the classroom where students are often rebuked for petty reasons and the syllabus fails to hold their interest.

To raise funds, some departments have resorted to the globally undervalued two-year Master’s degree programmes to complement the two-year Bachelor’s degrees. In a world guided by the Bologna Declaration (which harmonised European and other international degrees), one can only consider this step a desperate act and a lamentable situation to be in for any university. (The old system continues to run at other universities parallel to MS/MPhil degrees, one of the HEC’s better decisions to help Pakistani graduates gain international footing).

If it is efficient, intelligent universities the Punjab wants, it can start with the hard task of administratively separating school and higher education. Intermediate education must be taught, assessed and regulated in clear distinction to the university components of institutions, but with a view to bridging the distance between school and university.

This entails curricular reform at the Intermediate level: a constructive revision of goals, texts, teacher training and the examination system all geared towards preparing students for critical thinking and theorising.

For universities, the government needs to encourage the administration to be comfortable with departmental autonomy within HEC standards. Flexibility in departmental decisions, such as modest increases in tuition fees, accompanied by state-supported income-contingent loan programmes, can help address financial grievances. University managements must be reminded to support professors and students rather than encourage resource manipulation, as is currently the case. Technology can help here by redistributing the excess authority of office administrators.

In the long run, an informed opinion on what universities need and want can best be sought from an advisory group comprising vice chancellors, established academics, budding research scholars and policymakers. Links with similar people in other provinces and outside Pakistan can enrich discussions, similar to the HEC’s exercises since its constitution.

Until Punjab willingly faces and addresses the difficult demands higher education makes of those who want to regulate it, the province cannot understand — or guide — the universities’ worldviews, student research output affected by these worldviews or the social change these institutes of learning can drive.

The writer is a doctoral candidate in education at the University of Oxford.