PAKISTAN banned student unions in 1984 to depoliticise campuses and eliminate violence. More than four decades later, universities are more political than ever. The politics just moved from the student hostel to the faculty lounge. The result is that while wives, sons, daughters and favourites of senior professors walk into lecturer jobs, qualified PhDs fail to clear recruitment tests that have no syllabus and no rubric. They are all whim and fancy at work with the sole intent of killing merit.
Visit any public university recruitment test, and you will see the pattern. Tests are announced without reading lists. Answer sheets are not provided by the university. Marking criteria are never disclosed. Appeals are always ignored. This is not assessment. This is a ritual of exclusion.
When jobs are secured through patro-nage, pedagogy dies. Why would professors appointed through nepotism study teaching methods or Bloom’s Taxonomy? They did not need pedagogy to get the job. They will not need it to keep it. Classrooms become monologues from 20-year-old notes. Students memorise them and then forget. Industry insists graduates cannot think on their feet. This is not accidental.
Syndicates are packed with loyalists. Selection boards include colleagues and friends of candidates’ fathers. Departments run like family fiefs. In one Sindh uni-versity, three close relatives of senior faculty were appointed to the same department within 18 months; all through ‘departmental tests’ with no published answer key or marking scheme.
Unfortunately, teacher politics causes silent chaos. It destroys a generation’s faith in merit without a single stone thrown.
We have seen this before. Lord Curzon’s Indian Universities Act of 1904 was sold as ‘raising standards’. In practice, it tightened government control over faculty appointments, purged dissenting teachers, and packed university senates with officials instead of academics. The 2026 depart-mental test with secret criteria does the same. From Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education in 1835 till today, the examination has functioned less as a measure of learning and more as a gate kept by the gatekeepers.
To save our higher education, we must depoliticise faculty recruitment. Syllabus and marking scheme must be made public 30 days before any test. There should be double-blind marking by external examiners. No relative of a selection board member should appear. There should be an audit of all appointments made through departmental tests since 2018. Also, Right to Information (RTI) requests must be decided within 10 days, not ignored.
We banned students from politics to protect education. We left teacher politics untouched. Now the end-result is a system in which the loudest family connection always wins, not the best lesson plan.
Sarmad Hussain Tunio
Karachi
Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2026