Why Should the Man Who Left Still Hold the Keys?

On November 18, a single signature will decide who runs a great university for the next six months

A notification is due on November 18. If it reads as feared, one of central Punjab’s largest universities will spend six more months under the charge of a man who has already left it for a campus of his own. The question could hardly be plainer. When a man walks out of the house, why should he keep the keys?
Shakespeare settled it in the first scene of King Lear. The old king is dividing his kingdom among his daughters: lands parcelled out, revenues assigned, power handed over. Yet he holds one thing back, “the name, and all th’ addition to a king.” Lear wants to be relieved of the burden of governing and to keep the dignity of ruling. The duty goes to others while the trappings stay with him. Any teacher in a Pakistani university will recognise the arrangement. We call it additional charge.
The play’s answer is a storm, over the heath and inside the family. A man who keeps the title but not the duty, the authority but not the accountability, stops being a ruler. He becomes a presence in the corridors that nobody can dismiss and nobody can obey.
The local version runs as follows. A vice-chancellor signs a four-year contract. Before a quarter of the term has passed, a newer, smaller and far better-funded university catches his eye. His resignation arrives, a slap across the face of the institution he promised to build, and it is accepted. At that moment the old university has no one to hold the fort, because the pro-vice-chancellor its statute provides for was never appointed. Is it not the case that, despite the Chancellor’s instruction of November 2, the panel of three senior professors for that post was never sent? If it is, one must ask whether the vacancy was an accident or an arrangement.
Then comes the last turn. The man now in regular charge of the new university is handed additional charge of the old one as well. It is rather like divorcing a spouse in public and being asked to stay on as guardian of the household.
Which clause of which statute permits this, the lawyers can say. Common sense needs no clause. A person cannot stand at two doors at once. Someone whose office, budget, ambitions and future lie in one place cannot run another from a few hours of occasional attendance. He can only perform the ritual of running it. Call it part-time loyalty, and call the system built on it absentee governance. The decisions are his; the consequences are someone else’s. A man who does not live with the consequences has little reason to be careful with the decisions.
The first price is paid in files. A lecturer’s promotion waits for a signature. A researcher’s project sits in a tray. An employee’s case has hung fire for months. Behind every file is a household with instalments to pay and school fees falling due. For the newspaper reader, a university in crisis is an item of news. For those households it arrives on the first of every month.
The second price is silence. When a head’s tenure rests on the goodwill of patrons rather than the quality of his work, nobody contradicts him. The teacher knows that candour can be punished and silence rewarded, and soon everyone is calculating whom it is safest to stand near. Debate sinks to a whisper, and whispers breed rumour: tales of appointments, contracts and old scores being settled. How much of it is true is for an independent inquiry to say. But when a campus is thick with such tales, a finding of sorts is already in. Transparency has gone missing.
So questions must be put, and not to the man who resigned. They belong to those who let him go.
Did the search committee that chose him for four years weigh his attachment to the institution? When the Chancellor’s office asked on November 2 for names for the post of pro-vice-chancellor, why did nobody notice that they never came? On what rule did the Higher Education Department accept a resignation with no pro-vice-chancellor in place? Where were the provincial and national Higher Education Commissions, whose business is quality, while all this went on? And why was the man who broke his contract midway not asked to explain himself in writing?
Five questions, five doors. Until each one opens, responsibility will hang in the air like smoke. In a system where every decision belongs to everyone, no decision belongs to anyone.
Rome had a very different idea of borrowed power. In a crisis the Senate would entrust extraordinary authority to a single man, the dictator, for no more than six months. Tradition says that when Cincinnatus was summoned to rescue a Roman army trapped by its enemies, he was ploughing his field. He took the office, won the campaign, and after sixteen days laid down the power and went back to his furrow. Romans honoured him for centuries because he accepted authority and gave it up. In their eyes, the greatness of borrowed power lay in the speed with which it was returned.
Here the habit runs the other way. Power that arrives as a stopgap goes looking for ways to prolong itself. The man who was supposed to hand it back asks for more time. If he is given it, six full months of it, the tradition for which Cincinnatus is remembered will have been stood on its head.
Here the Chief Minister cannot be left out, for the credibility of her reform agenda is at stake. Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz has promised merit, transparency and institutions free of corruption. It is a worthy promise, and the yardstick for it lies in her own words. Universities across the province will read this decision as a test of that promise. A six-month extension will not be taken as a technicality. It will be read as a message that a contract is a formality and patronage knows no limit.
The remedy is not complicated, and none of its steps needs to wait for the notification. First, appoint a qualified and unblemished senior professor as pro-vice-chancellor in accordance with the university’s act, so that the institution has a head of its own and the files begin to move. Second, advertise the vice-chancellor’s post without delay, and conduct the search in the open, on paper, where it can be scrutinised. Third, end the additional-charge arrangement, and obtain a written explanation from the man who left in the middle of his contract.
Lear grasps, on the heath, in the dark and the rain, how little a title is worth once its duties have been given away. By then he has lost everything. The university need not travel as far as that night. The decision is still in hand.
On November 18 a single line will be written. Either the one who has gone will be succeeded by someone whose bond with this house is complete, or the keys will stay in a hand that has already walked through the door. Students and teachers are waiting on that line. What they need is a head whose name is on the door, and not on a plaque in another city.