SOMETHING is rotten in the state of higher education in the country. A familiar set of circumstances — students belonging to different unions attacking each other, triggering disciplinary action by university authorities — has yielded an extraordinary confession.

A student of Punjab University allegedly not only told university authorities at a disciplinary hearing that he considers slain Taliban chieftains Nek Muhammad and Baitullah Mehsud to be his leaders, but that he intends to avenge their deaths in drone strikes.

Revealingly, Attique Afridi, the student now in custody of the intelligence apparatus, is believed to be associated with the Pakhtun Educational Development Movement — a PU student association, alongside a Baloch group, that clashed with the Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba, the student union more commonly associated with religious extremism on public campuses.

The roots of extremist links in universities, both public and private, appear to have spread far and wide.

Long rumoured, but mostly ignored, the problem of militancy and extremism among university students may be coming to the fore for a complex set of reasons.

The relentless pressure on the banned TTP and other anti-state militant outfits has likely created a vacuum that new breeds of militancy will try and fill.

In addition, the turmoil in the Middle East, the rise of the militant Islamic State group and a growing online culture where hate material and militant propaganda have vastly proliferated, have probably worked to attract a growing number of university students to extremist fare and militancy.

Certainly, the problem is not new — Omar Sheikh remains one of the most notorious private-school educated militants in the country’s history — and is not confined to public campuses. Indeed, private universities may be more vulnerable to creeping extremism and militancy on campus because most have no experience of monitoring or handling extremist organisations on campus, among teachers or students.

Combating extremism and militancy on campuses will prove a formidable challenge. For one, the state itself appears to have underestimated the problem.

The National Action Plan drawn up in December 2014 rightly identified the need to reform and modernise madressahs, but there was no mention of universities in the mainstream.

In addition, the higher-education landscape is heavily fractured, with the provinces trying to assert their rights under the 18th Amendment, the centre failing to embrace a new role as coordinator among the federating units, and private universities having mushroomed in recent years with no adequate regulatory structure.

But those challenges only underscore the need for urgency. Recent history has demonstrated how militancy and extremism can metastasise quickly, so while the problems on campuses today are real, they still appear to be confined to relatively small sections of the student population.

Action taken now — concerted, meaningful action across the provinces that balances the concerns of security with the rights of students — could help avoid a terrible societal unravelling. Extremism on campuses is an addressable problem.

Published in Dawn, March 15th, 2016