MORAL policing appears to have become the new normal on Pakistani campuses, and apparently one of the most effective ways that morality can be upheld is to keep young men and women apart. A report in this paper on Saturday gave a glimpse of the gender segregation being practised at some institutes of higher education. At times this follows an unwritten agenda, at others there are codes of conduct and fines — even strong-arm tactics — to enforce it. At the Punjab University in Lahore, where the Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba is the flag-bearer of the moral police, girl students are compelled to sit at the back of the class — which is not much better than making them sit at the back of the bus. This approach extends to other aspects of campus life as well: some canteens are out of bounds entirely for girls, while at others their seating is located behind a curtained-off area. At another institute, each gender has its own entryway and couples detected sitting together are fined Rs5,000 each.

It was not very long ago when universities treated their students as adults with the capacity to make decisions — whether right or wrong — based on the values that had been inculcated in them. Even when campus administrations sometimes introduced bizarre rules to prevent student fraternisation, these were treated with levity. After all, at this stage, young people are on the threshold of stepping out into the real world, a complex place where gender segregation is rarely the norm and impossible to achieve without sacrificing productivity and efficiency. Institutes of higher learning thus offer valuable opportunities for students to learn to interact with people of the opposite gender — in other words, learn how to conduct themselves in society. However, a blinkered, authoritarian worldview has overtaken many campuses, and administrations are either afraid to challenge ideologically conservative student groups or they share the same thinking. Building walls between students on the basis of gender is not the way to foster a healthy attitude to life.

Published in Dawn January 30th, 2017