For three days in mid-October, Punjabi and Pashtun students fought a pitched battle at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad. With sticks, stones and automatic weapons they hammered away. From my end of campus I could hear bursts of Kalashnikov fire. Then, on the fourth day, one student died of gunshot wounds and the university closed down. Although classes resumed three weeks later, fear of revenge killings continues to stalk the campus. This last murder was the fourth this year at Pakistan's most prestigious public sector university.
It is no surprise that Pakistan's public universities are so prone to bloodletting. Even the "big names" - Punjab, Karachi, QAU - are populated by feuding tribes of students. The tribalism is not new but it was accentuated by the banning of student unions over 15 years ago on the grounds that they brought national politics into educational institutions. Today the only student representation permitted is through ethnic and religious groups.
Religious vigilantes contribute to intellectual desertification. On their orders, theatre and musical events are forbidden, as are activities that can bring male and female students together. In Punjab University, males and females must sit in separate sections of the classroom. Student activists rove the streets in Peshawar and Lahore, throwing paint on billboards showing women's faces. Posters on stairwells in my department instruct one about the proper prayer to use while ascending or descending.
Violence and ethnic conflict are just one manifestation of a deeper and more disturbing reality. Pakistan's public universities are barren. There are virtually no seminars, public lectures, or debates on contemporary scientific, cultural or political issues. Consequently campuses are breeding grounds for the mass production of "lumpen" graduates. Ignorant and uncurious, with poor reading and writing skills, incapable of coherently articulating an argument, with little sense of politics or history, these students show few of the qualities that one associates with a university.
The intellectual impoverishment of Pakistan - or for that matter the Islamic world - has little to do with lack of resources and very much to do with inappropriate values and attitudes. And here the primary fault lies with the teachers rather than the students. With some exceptions, teachers at public universities care little about the subjects they teach. Many teachers never consult a textbook and dictate from notes they saved from the time when they were students in that same department. Questions in class are usually frowned upon, seen as an affront to authority.
Consider mathematics and theoretical physics. The resources needed to develop these are next to zero. They are the hardest and most rigorous disciplines to master, constituting the foundation of all science. Tragically, today there is not one Pakistani under 50 and living in Pakistan who has any degree of international recognition as a mathematician or theoretical physicist. When I started teaching at Quaid-e-Azam University 30 years ago, one could have counted up to 20 names across the country.
Evidence of decline confronts me all the time. Today, walking to my office in the physics department, I passed by a group of young burqa-clad women students. They were softly chanting together. This was, however, not a religious dars. Rather, they were cramming physics formulae for a forthcoming exam. Pakistan's new generation of science students has been brought up to memorise efficiently and reproduce.
Enter Atta-ur-Rahman, appointed by Pervez Musharraf as chairman of the higher education commission, charged with reforming education. Here is a man of great dynamism and sincerity. Most importantly, he has billions in cash. As a consequence, many university departments are today awash in research funds and special incentives have been announced for PhD students and their supervisors. An optional tenure track scheme for high flyers has been announced, while 300 foreign faculty members are to be hired at international-scale salaries. Thirty years ago, Atta's schemes could have worked wonders. But the rot is now so deep that the outcome of any technical fix, however well intentioned, is far from certain. Pakistan's violent international image drives away foreigners; the still-dwindling number of Pakistani faculty members who can properly guide PhD research is now minuscule; students registered for PhD research (and often their supervisors) are shockingly deficient in the basics; and private universities are tearing the remaining good faculties away from public universities.
For decades one has heard of grand plans to build MITs and Harvards in Pakistan, or at least something like the Indian institutes of technology. But these have come to naught because they failed to realise what is basic - good universities are self-governing communities of scholars engaged in free inquiry, discovery and transmission of knowledge. Such institutions can grow only if freedom and liberty are valued and if the urge to innovate is rewarded. Universities lie at the heart of modern civilisation, the secret behind its awesome strength. Pakistan has yet to get a real university. Building nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles is no substitute.
