LAHORE, Jan 20: A shroud of confusion surrounds a notification de-affiliating 42 education and elementary colleges and departments from the newly established University of Education (UoE) as both the provincial education secretary and the UoE vice-chancellor express their ignorance about issuance of any such order.

Soon after the establishment of the UoE, the Punjab education department had on Sept 21, 2002, affiliated all the colleges and departments — the Directorate of Staff Development, all government colleges of education, all government colleges of elementary education in Lahore, the provincial education assessment centre in Lahore — with the new university.

The colleges and departments were earlier affiliated with different universities of Punjab.

However, a notification (No:P-A/AS (P) UOE-1/2002) issued on Jan 6 de-notified them from the university and revived their previous organizational structures. The order was sent to all colleges and departments concerned as well as the offices of the three directors public instruction (DPIs) concerned in the province.

The order addressed to the UoE says: “the institutions will now remain the same as they were before being integrated in the University of Education. The posts in these integrated institutions will remain unaltered and continued to be filled in the manner prior to the integration”.

The notification also said that the government staff working in the integrated institutions would continue to draw the same pay and emoluments and benefits as available to them in the government service.

UoE VC Dr Mustafa Habibullah categorically denied the existence of the notification, Education secretary Sibtain Fazl-i-Haleem, however, was a bit vague in his response. He claimed that the changes in question were not made. But he did not explain anything about the controversial notification.

Sources in the education department told Dawn that UoE Vice-Chancellor Dr Mustafa did not want de-affiliation of the colleges/departments because he thinks that it would be considered as failure of the new university.

They said de-notification showed that no proper homework had been done before the launch of the university which proved to be a cause of embarrassment for the authorities concerned at the very outset.

A senior official of the education department said the university had been offering PhD programmes in a number of disciplines without evolving a proper infrastructure. An applicant was required to contact a senior educator and researcher holding PhD for the supervision of his PhD course which helped the university to enrol a large number of students without hiring professionals for its faculty. — Zulqernain Tahir