Why Ranking Doesn’t Pay at Pakistan’s Universities
Visiting faculty are the backbone of Pakistan’s universities, yet in many public institutions, they face delayed salaries, informal contracts, and financial precarity. This is not a local glitch; it is a systemic governance failure. Institutions such as NUML show that merit-based hiring and timely payment are possible, proving reform is achievable. @Higher Education Commission Pakistan, it’s time to protect academic labour and ensure the sanctity of contracts.
One day, I saw the advertisement on social media of Pakistan’s highest-ranked public university celebrating an international research citation and a rise in global ranking. The next, another post circulating on Facebook, far more mundane and revealing, informing that visiting faculty salaries disbursement has been “delayed.” This quiet irony captures the condition of Pakistan’s higher education system: global prestige built atop domestic precarity.
Across the world, elite universities such as Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge are not only intellectual powerhouses but also financially resilient institutions. Their stability allows them to plan long-term, protect academic labor, and absorb economic shocks. Pakistan’s experience presents a stark contrast. Universities like Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU) achieve international recognition while remaining perpetually teetering on the edge of insolvency. This is not an academic failure; it is a governance failure.
The Precarity of Prestige
Financial resilience in leading universities is not accidental. Harvard’s endowment, exceeding $50 billion, is institutional insulation, enabling budgetary autonomy, safeguarding contractual obligations, and shielding academic life from political volatility. Oxford and Cambridge, while publicly embedded, operate through vast trusts and decentralised governance structures that prevent bureaucratic chokeholds.
Pakistan’s public universities function under the opposite logic. They are overwhelmingly dependent on the state, with limited financial autonomy and virtually no endowment culture. Alumni giving remains informal, corporate philanthropy is weakly incentivized, and universities have little authority to generate or retain independent revenue. Financial decision-making is centralized and slow, ensuring that funds are throttled by red tape long before they reach classrooms or laboratories.
This fragility is reflected in public funding. For the 2025-26 fiscal year, the Higher Education Commission (HEC) saw its development budget slashed by over 35 percent to roughly Rs 39.5 billion, down from over Rs 61 billion the previous year. Meanwhile, the recurring grant, the lifeblood of salaries and operations, has remained largely stagnant in real terms for nearly seven years. In a landscape of record inflation, per-student spending has effectively evaporated even as enrollments surged. Prestige has grown; purchasing power has not.
A Silent Labour Crisis
This structural weakness has produced a silent labour crisis: the systematic precaritization of visiting faculty. Across Pakistan, particularly in Islamabad and Punjab, visiting faculty now sustain the bulk of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. In many departments, they outnumber permanent staff, compensating for expanding enrollments and the ossification of permanent faculty cadres.
Yet this reliance has created a moral hazard. Delayed remuneration, sometimes extending beyond a year, has been normalised. Unpaid academic labor now functions as an informal financing mechanism, allowing universities to manage liquidity shortfalls by transferring financial risk onto their most vulnerable educators. What is administratively framed as a “delay” operates, in effect, as a compulsory, interest-free loan extracted from highly trained scholars.
Such a model would be inconceivable in financially stable systems. In leading universities abroad, the sanctity of academic contracts is non-negotiable. Delayed payment would trigger legal action and reputational damage. In Pakistan, it has been routinized. The consequences are predictable: declining morale, compromised teaching quality, and the steady exit of young scholars to systems that offer dignity alongside opportunity.
A Regional Perspective
This predicament is not an inevitable feature of the Global South. Even within South Asia, comparisons are instructive. India’s public higher education system maintains clearer contractual norms for academic labor and higher per-capita investment in its premier institutes. Bangladesh, despite operating with limited resources, has shown a greater commitment to formalizing faculty structures to meet rising demand. Pakistan’s crisis, therefore, is not regional destiny but a domestic policy choice, prioritizing physical infrastructure over human capital.
The Path to Solvency
Quaid-i-Azam University exemplifies the paradox. As the country’s top-ranked public university, it symbolizes national intellectual ambition. Yet its recurring financial distress exposes a deeper contradiction: rankings are celebrated while the institutional conditions that sustain excellence are neglected. Prestige, in this model, becomes performative, divorced from material support.
What, then, is to be done?
First, Pakistan urgently needs a Visiting Faculty Charter, enforced by the HEC, mandating payment within 30 days of service, with penalties for institutional non-compliance.
Second, public universities must be enabled to build endowments, supported by meaningful tax incentives for corporate and alumni giving, reducing total dependence on volatile annual state allocations.
Third, universities require genuine governance decoupling and financial autonomy insulated from ministerial micromanagement to ensure the sanctity of academic contracts.
Ultimately, Pakistan must recognize that universities are not expenditure centers but long-term national investments. A system that treats its scholars as disposable cannot credibly claim commitment to knowledge, innovation, or development. Until academic labor is protected with the same seriousness as rankings are celebrated, the ivory tower will remain a structure of shifting sand, impressive from afar, unstable at its core.
