Visiting Faculty and Pakistan’s Universities!
The Higher Education Commission’s recent guidelines on visiting faculty represent a welcome and necessary step toward bringing order to an expanding higher education system. For the first time in clear regulatory terms, they acknowledge what universities have long relied upon in practice: visiting faculty are no longer peripheral; they are central to teaching delivery across disciplines.
That recognition is important. But it is no longer enough.
Because Pakistan’s higher education challenge is no longer about defining the role of visiting faculty. It is about confronting the conditions under which that role is performed and what those conditions reveal about the system itself.
Across public and private universities, visiting faculty carry a substantial share of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. In many departments, they are not filling occasional gaps; they are teaching core courses that sustain entire degree programs. Yet the structure governing their work remains uneven, fragmented, and often invisible in policy design.
Three realities define this landscape.
First, remuneration is highly uneven. There is no unified national framework for visiting faculty compensation. Rates vary significantly across institutions, and sometimes even within the same university. What should be a coherent national academic labor market instead resembles a patchwork of discretionary arrangements, producing structural inequality in a workforce that is already institutionally dependent.
Second, payment is frequently delayed. In some cases, salaries are released months after the completion of a semester. This creates a basic rupture between work and compensation. Teaching follows an academic calendar; payment does not always do so. For many educators, this is not an administrative inconvenience but a predictable cycle of financial precarity embedded into the system itself.
Third, academic experience accumulated through visiting appointments is inconsistently recognized. Years of teaching may carry limited weight in hiring and promotion decisions. This weakens career continuity and sends a quiet but powerful signal: sustained teaching labor does not always translate into institutional mobility.
Individually, these may appear as administrative inefficiencies. Taken together, they point to something more structural: a higher education system that depends heavily on a workforce it does not fully secure.
This raises a question that can no longer be deferred. Can a national university system be considered stable when a significant portion of its teaching is delivered by academics operating under persistent uncertainty?
The issue here is not symbolic recognition. It is institutional design. No system can indefinitely externalize its core teaching function onto labor that remains economically and professionally unstable. When that happens, universities may continue to operate, but their internal coherence begins to weaken in subtle yet cumulative ways.
Teaching becomes more fragmented. Continuity between courses and semesters becomes harder to sustain. Institutional memory thins as experienced educators cycle in and out of appointments. Over time, the university does not collapse, but it loses depth.
The Higher Education Commission’s guidelines provide a regulatory foundation, but Pakistan’s longstanding challenge has rarely been the absence of policy. It has been the distance between policy and implementation.
Without enforceable mechanisms, three risks persist. Institutional practices will continue to diverge across universities. Payment cycles will remain inconsistent. And academic career pathways for visiting faculty will remain weak and unpredictable. The result is a fragmented system in which regulatory intent exists, but operational coherence is uneven.
Addressing this requires moving beyond guidelines toward minimum structural guarantees.
A national remuneration framework is essential if equity within the academic labor market is to have any real meaning. Payment timelines must be formally aligned with academic calendars to restore basic predictability between work and compensation. Visiting teaching experience must be systematically integrated into recruitment and promotion structures if academic careers are to have continuity. And compliance cannot remain discretionary; it must be supported by clear institutional accountability mechanisms.
These are not radical reforms. They are basic requirements for system stability.
The deeper question, however, extends beyond policy instruments. It concerns the nature of the university itself.
A university is not defined only by infrastructure, enrollment, or rankings. It is defined by the stability and continuity of the academic labor that sustains it. When that labor becomes structurally precarious, the effects accumulate quietly: teaching becomes fragmented, institutional memory weakens, and long-term academic commitment erodes.
The system remains functional, but its intellectual foundations gradually thin out.
At its core, then, the question facing higher education governance is not administrative but architectural. What kind of university system is being built when its teaching backbone remains structurally unsecured?
This is not simply a matter of fairness to faculty. It is a question of long-term institutional durability, academic quality, and national intellectual capacity.
Pakistan’s higher education system stands at an inflection point. The growing reliance on visiting faculty is not inherently problematic. The problem emerges when that reliance is not matched by structural security.
If visiting faculty are now central to teaching delivery, then their institutional position must reflect that reality, not as symbolic recognition but as structural design.
A higher education system cannot sustain excellence on a foundation of persistent insecurity. Eventually, the structure begins to reflect the conditions of those who hold it up, and that point, increasingly, appears to have already arrived.
