A Nation of Universities, But Too Few Scholarly Conversations

Senior academics are asking a difficult question: Are our universities measuring what truly matters or merely celebrating what is easiest to announce?

In Pakistan’s higher-education community, where conversations among university leaders too often revolve around ceremonies, rankings, appointments, buildings, and institutional announcements, a recent WhatsApp exchange among senior educators offered something far more valuable: an invitation to think.

The idea came from Prof. Dr. Javaid Laghari, former Chairperson of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. He suggested that the WhatsApp forum for senior educators and vice chancellors should do more than serve as a digital noticeboard for institutional activities.

His proposal was simple yet consequential. Why not use such a forum to discuss how universities can advance education, research, public service, and entrepreneurship? Why not examine the forces reshaping higher education around the world: university mergers in Britain, declining enrollment, artificial intelligence in education, the changing nature of employment, and the programs that are flourishing and those that may no longer have a future?

In other words, why not talk about the future rather than merely report the present?

Prof. Dr. Sohail Naqvi, former Executive Director of the HEC, identified what he considered perhaps the most important challenge facing universities: a lack of ownership among the communities they are meant to serve.

His argument goes beyond the conventional complaint about inadequate funding or political interference. Universities, he suggested, cannot expect society to defend and support them if society does not view them as its own institutions. When universities fail to demonstrate their purpose and their stakeholders feel little connection to their success, political intervention and financial neglect become almost inevitable.

But in Prof. Naqvi’s formulation, ownership is not merely an emotional attachment. It is an institutional discipline. Every university must know why it exists, define what success means, and, crucially, measure whether it is succeeding. That sounds obvious. Yet it marks a profound departure from how institutions often celebrate success.

For years, universities have become remarkably efficient at celebrating inputs: new buildings, memorandums of understanding, conferences, delegations, appointments, inaugurations, workshops, committees, and ceremonial photographs.

But these are not necessarily evidence of educational success.

The harder questions lie elsewhere.

• Are graduates finding meaningful employment?
• Are students acquiring skills that employers and society need?
• Is research solving problems?
• Are universities creating knowledge rather than merely publishing papers?
• Are communities benefiting from the expertise housed within universities?
• Are academic programs still relevant or are some being kept alive simply because no one dares to close them?

These are questions of outcomes, not input.

And that distinction may determine whether Pakistani higher education can meet the enormous changes now unfolding around it.

The uncomfortable question of leadership

Prof. Dr. Raza Bhatti, an internationally recognized researcher and educationist, pushed the discussion into more uncomfortable territory. If universities suffer from a lack of ownership by their communities, he asked, do the people entrusted with leading those universities themselves possess a genuine sense of ownership?

It is an uncomfortable question because institutional ownership begins at the top.

A vice chancellor cannot demand accountability from faculty while treating institutional resources lightly. A professor cannot lecture students on discipline while neglecting institutional responsibilities. A governing board cannot demand excellence while tolerating mediocrity. And a university cannot ask society to invest its trust and resources while failing to demonstrate that it values either.

Prof. Bhatti's observation came from a particularly revealing transition. After approximately four decades in public-sector institutions, he joined a private-sector university at the beginning of 2026. He noted that the experience brought into sharper focus the value attached to time and money in private institutions compared with public-sector organizations.

The observation is not an indictment of every public university, nor an endorsement of every private one. Rather, it raises a question that Pakistan's higher-education leadership has too often avoided:

Why should the stewardship of public resources be less demanding than the stewardship of private resources?

Public universities are not ownerless institutions. Their owners, in the broadest sense, are the citizens (taxpayers) who finance them, the communities they serve, the students who pass through them, and the generations whose future depends upon them.

Ownership must become a strategy.

Prof. Naqvi's response to Dr. Bhatti was equally important. He argued that no institutional model is perfect. Universities everywhere operate through compromises.

The responsibility of a Vice Chancellor, therefore, is not to wait for an ideal environment. It is to develop a case and a strategy for building community ownership and persuade the governing board to support it.

This applies to both public and private universities.

In the public sector, community ownership can mean demonstrating that a university is improving the lives of its region by strengthening schools, supporting industry, solving agricultural problems, producing employable graduates, improving public health, nurturing entrepreneurship, or contributing evidence to public policy.

In the private sector, it means demonstrating that financial sustainability and educational purpose are not competing objectives but mutually reinforcing ones.

A university that creates value for its community creates legitimacy. Legitimacy attracts support. Support strengthens institutions. Strong institutions are better positioned to resist inappropriate interference and invest in long-term excellence.

Ownership, therefore, is not a slogan. It is an institutional strategy.

Prof. Dr. Junaid Zaidi, founding Rector of COMSATS, endorsed these observations, lending further weight to an argument that deserves to move beyond an informal digital conversation and into the mainstream debate about Pakistan's higher-education future.

The missing conversation

According to Prof. Emeritus Dr. Muhammad Mukhtar, Rector of the University of Southern Punjab Multan, who has served as Vice Chancellor for almost seven universities in the country, the most important point in this exchange concerns something even more fundamental: the quality of intellectual interaction among Pakistan's academics.

Mukhtar argues that our universities are full of intelligent people. Yet intelligence becomes institutional strength only when it is connected, when scholars exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, share successful practices, and collectively confront emerging problems.

Too often, our academic culture remains remarkably fragmented.

Professors work within their departments. Departments operate within universities. Universities compete with one another. Vice Chancellors/Rectors meet up on formal occasions. Conferences are organized. Speeches are delivered. Photographs are taken.

But where is the sustained intellectual conversation? Mukhtar's thoughts echoed Prof. Laghari's.

Where do Pakistan's university leaders regularly debate whether artificial intelligence will fundamentally alter teaching? Where do they examine the implications of declining enrollment? Where do they discuss whether Pakistan is producing too many graduates in some disciplines and too few in others? Where do they compare institutional models? Where do they openly discuss programs that should be redesigned or even discontinued?

Since returning from the United States of America, lured by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan's Foreign Faculty Hiring Programs, Prof. Mukhtar has struggled with the idea that Pakistani academics need stronger opportunities for both scholarly and personal interaction. This conviction led him to establish the Inter University Consortium for the Promotion of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities (IUCPSS) with like-minded vice chancellors to create a platform for universities to interact, share best practices, and engage with contemporary academic developments.

The need for such interaction has not diminished. If anything, it has become more urgent.

Prof. Mukhtar also lamented that even on professional platforms such as LinkedIn, interaction among Pakistani academics remains surprisingly limited. Observing the professional presence of senior professors, he says, he has found it striking that some maintain remarkably small professional networks. The issue is not the number of connections on a social-media platform. The deeper concern is what that number can symbolize: academic isolation in an age when knowledge increasingly advances through networks.

The world’s leading universities do not operate as intellectual islands.

They are connected to governments, industries, laboratories, think tanks, communities, and one another. Their academics collaborate across disciplines and borders. Their leaders continually compare performance, rethink programs, and anticipate disruption.

Pakistan cannot afford to remain intellectually fragmented while the global university system is rapidly transforming.

From announcements to accountability

This is why Prof. Laghari's original suggestion deserves to be taken seriously.

A forum of university leaders should not become another stream of institutional publicity. We already have enough of those.

What Pakistan needs are intellectual social media groups.

• A place where a Vice Chancellor can ask why enrollment is declining without fearing that the question will be interpreted as an institutional weakness.

• A place where academics can discuss whether artificial intelligence will render some traditional teaching models obsolete.

• A place where university leaders can share how they reduced administrative waste, improved student retention, strengthened research, or built meaningful industry relationships.

• A place where someone can ask the difficult question: Which academic programs should we stop offering?

And where another can answer it with evidence rather than defensiveness.

This requires a cultural shift from competition to constructive comparison, from ceremonial networking to intellectual networking, and from celebrating inputs to measuring outcomes.

The Higher Education Commission, provincial higher education commissions, relevant ministries, and university leadership all have a role to play. But no regulatory framework can create intellectual curiosity. That must come from within the academic community itself.

Pakistan does not lack professors and scholars. It does not lack universities. It does not lack talented students or capable researchers.

What it lacks, too often, is connection.

• Connection between universities and communities.
• Connection between research and national problems.
• Connection between education and employment.
• Connection between leadership and accountability.
• Connection among the people who are themselves responsible for educating the nation.

The universities of the future will not be distinguished merely by the size of their campuses, the number of buildings they inaugurate, or the number of photographs they publish.

They will be distinguished by whether their communities believe in them, whether their leaders take genuine ownership, whether their scholars learn from one another, and whether their graduates and research make a measurable difference in society.

The time has come to move from announcing activity to demonstrating impact.