Why Vice Chancellors should belong to Academia

The appointment of a retired brigadier as the vice-chancellor of Bolan University by the Balochistan government is contrary to what FAPUASA and the HEC had expected. Barely a week ago, Dr Attaur Rahman, chairman of the Higher Education Commission, had assured a delegation of the Federation of All Pakistan Universities Academic Staff Association that no army person would now be appointed VC in any university. It is shocking that in total disregard of academic requirements, the governor of Balochistan has proceeded to break the rules to accommodate yet another retired military officer as VC.

This is the same university which was once headed by the venerable Karrar Hussain, its founding Vice Chancellor. It is a shame that the same university is going to be headed by an incompetent retired military general who was appointed politically by bypassing the prescribed procedure of selection of university vice chancellors. The prescribed procedure is pretty clear and straightforward. It calls for a ‘vice-chancellor search committee’ to be formed with the governor’s approval, followed by an announcement by the HEC for the position of vice-chancellor in all national dailies. The applicants are then short-listed and interviewed by the search committee after which it has to forward the names of three candidates for the chancellor’s (governor of the province) approval. The chancellor will then have the prerogative to select a person from amongst them or ask for fresh recommendations. Obviously nothing of this sort has been done in this particular case.

This news has two different aspects in my opinion. One is the political aspect which addresses the role of military in a civil society and the discomfort generated among the civilians if military crosses its limits and tries to expand its influence by taking up the powers which are supposed to be used by civilian specialists to manage certain civilian organizations. Other is the academic aspect where main purpose is to come up with a setup such that universities start playing their role of bringing positive social changes in the society through promoting a culture of awareness and logical reasoning. I will address the academic aspect of the issue in this article and try to show how it impacts negatively if non-academic people are appointed as the heads of universities.

Role of a university is extremely important in a society. It is supposed to be a place where philosophers, both from social and physical sciences, are provided with an intellectual environment that cultivates and refines newer ideas. In universities, ideals of a society are defined which are considered to be the social targets. Based on the ideals, university is responsible for training visionary youngsters so that they can take up the responsibility to bring positive changes in the society. Being more precise, social scientists at universities define the goals for social development and train the youngsters who take the responsibility to drive the society according to the ideals defined by their mentors at university through political/legislative process. Physical scientists develop newer ideas in science and technology which are propagated to the society through entrepreneurship and effective government policy making. In this case also, professional workforce is generated by intellectuals at university.

But sadly, university is seen as a tuition center by most of us. According to a person coming from any background other than academia, sole purpose of university is to generate a few hundred visionless degree holders so that those degree holders can get jobs and earn their living. To such a person, important thing is that exams should be held on time and campus should look neat and clean (you know trees with white trunks and red flower pots etc.!). Opening and closing times of hostel gates, implementing a dress code, managing canteens and cafeteria environment is the main purpose of such a person. He doesn’t realize the importance of scholarship, intellectual freedom, importance of research and even importance of dedicated teaching as he is not trained to think that way. A university whose problem is holding exams on time rather than making possible real research and scholarship is not a university in the first place. Can we expect from such a person that he will be able to provide the intellectuals concentrated in a university with a proper environment? Appointing retired military officials creates exactly same sort of problems.

Among the group of those few people who support the retired military officer’s role as vice chancellor of a university, most important point raised is his administrative skills. These people believe that people from academia are not good administrators. In my opinion, those people misinterpret the term "administrative skills". Retired military officers are only good at maintaining law and order as they were trained to be. But maintaining law and order is only one aspect of administration. Otherwise administration is a very broad term and administrative skills for each domain are very different from others. Being administrator of a research lab is different than being administrator of a battalion. Database administration and network administration are also management and administration fields requiring technical knowledge. Business administration requires business skills. What about giving the tasks of administrating Oracle databases and Cisco based networks to retired military officers if they are that good in "administrative skills"? What about appointing a graduate of world class MBA program at Mangla as corpse commander as he is also an administrator? I mean, for each task, we need to have administrators who are trained to be the specialists of that task. Same is true for academia. A person coming from a non-academic background is simply not trained for administration of academic environment hence not suitable for the job. An academic environment has its own requirements and an army person is quite simply under experienced for that. On the other hand, a university president/VC is normally a person of enviable record who has risen through the ranks of administrative duties in various academic organizations. There are various levels to it just like there are ranks in the military. For example, he could be a head of department, Dean of a College (some universities are divided into administrative units called Colleges. It shouldn’t be confused with Inter-colleges of Pakistan), vice president research, vice president academic affairs and so on. However, the top position does require administrative excellence and not just a promotion through the ranks.

If law and order situation is that bad in universities in Pakistan, I suggest that retired army officers should be appointed as chief security officers so that they can enforce law and order at university campuses. Appointing them as vice chancellors kills the whole purpose of a university and hence getting rid of political violence at university costs us the university itself.

On another note, politics at university campuses in not a bad thing as far as it doesn’t involve violence and disruption in academic procedures. As a matter of fact, university environment should train its students about the importance of democracy and politics. Instead of snubbing the freedom of speech and action to maintain law and order, constructive politics should be allowed at university campuses where limits of freedom are well defined and mixing violence with politics is punishable. Army training doesn’t recognize the importance of politics at all. While university environment by its nature is a very democratic process where positive and polite disagreement is considered a symbol of creativity and blind obedience is considered a weakness. Vice chancellors coming from military background don’t recognize the importance of healthy debate and consider it a symbol of disobedience and arrogance.

It should also be mentioned that administrative positions are usually a drag for academics, for instance in various departments in the US, it is usually an issue to convince a faculty member to serve as the head of the department or as graduate director i.e. despite the fact administrative appointments carry a 12 month salary as against 9 months for an academic position. In our universities becoming a Dean or a Head of the Department is through a process which is militaristic in nature itself i.e. based on seniority etc. rather than academic achievements. In a sense this perverts the whole logic of the work environment in a university and a military VC further reinforces this inverted logic by rewarding loyalty and punctuality instead of evaluating faculty in terms of academic and scholarly achievements. A great example in my view is of Dr. Ata ur Rehman, his academic background has allowed him (and us through him) to think of our universities in terms of what really matters when it comes to institutes of higher education. I am not saying that we all have to agree with what he has done, as I most definitely do not agree with many of the measures taken by HEC as regards Social Sciences and Humanities, my point instead is that whether weak or strong this is the first time we are looking at our universities from an academic point of view. We may also disagree with the claims that HEC has made in terms of its achievements but then our disagreement is in terms of whether those claims are true and not if the direction in which those claims are being made is incorrect. I wish and hope that all HECs claims become true I am willing to contribute in any way to make that happen, but the fact that HEC announced "no more military VCs" and a Military appointment followed immediately makes me wonder about a lot of statements issued by HEC. If some members of the HEC also read this article, it will be good to have some opinion from them as to what exactly happened in this case.


Note: Article was compiled through the archives of discussions taking place on research-network Pakistan which is a community of Pakistani Researchers. For more information, visit: http://www.vttp.org or research-network@yahoogroups.com