RAWALPINDI, Jan 16: News that the caretaker government of Punjab “has decided” to return the city’s prestigious Gordon College to the Christian mission, which had founded it 118 years ago, burst as a bombshell on the staff and students of the college on Wednesday.

Uneasiness gripped the institution which was taken over by the government in 1972 under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s general nationalisation policy.

Teachers and students alike resented the move to privatise the college.

A senior faculty member told Dawn that the students wanted to stage a protest rally but were barred by teachers as send-up examinations are going on.

A letter sent by Punjab’s Caretaker Minister for Education Meera Phailbus to the principal of the college asking for data on current enrolment, fee structure, strength of the faculty and other staff, classrooms and other paraphernalia, was said to have confirmed their apprehensions that denationalisation of the college was on the way.

No other nationalised college has received such a letter but several cases have been pending in district and high courts about the ownership of Gordon College, the city’s oldest institution.

A senior staff member, who did not wish to be identified, however dismissed the letter as a routine matter.

Every year the Punjab government seeks such data from every college, he said, adding that nothing had been communicated in written about the much-talked-about privatization of Gordon College.

According to him the present status of the college “has become irreversible”.

Only some members of the Christian community continue propagating about its denationalisation.

People claiming to be members of the Christian mission had been visiting the college telling its staff that they will soon get the college back and will run it, other teachers said.

Meanwhile, the Punjab Professors and Lecturers Association (PPLA), Rawalpindi division, in a press release, threatened that the teachers of Gordon College would boycott election duties and would chalk out a protest plan if the government did not clarify its position on the denationalisation issue by January 31.

Local office-bearers of the PPLA decided at a meeting held at the college on Wednesday to eschew protest unless it was forced upon them by returning the college to the private sector.

They asked the government to deny the denationalisation report to end the restlessness among the 4,000 students of the college.