By: Dr. Zeeshan Qasim
A university, at its best, functions like a ladder, climbed rung by rung from admission to graduation, each step trusted to bear weight because the institution beneath was built to hold it. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa today that ladder still stands, to the casual eye, but anyone who puts real weight on it finds how many rungs have quietly rotted away. Funding has gone. Governance has weakened, and decorum has eroded. The law has grown ambiguous where it should be precise. The service structure that once gave employees a sense of where they stood has all but vanished. And academic standards, the reason a ladder of learning exists at all, have sagged under the weight of every other failure. What should alarm anyone who still believes in these institutions is how completely the failures reinforce one another.
Begin with money, since the collapse is easiest to measure there. More than thirty public universities carry a collective deficit exceeding fifteen billion rupees, expenditure near thirty-four billion against income of around eighteen billion. The HEC’s grant, frozen at roughly nine point four billion since 2018, has not kept pace with rising salaries or enrolment. At the University of Peshawar, revenue of around three billion has had to stretch to cover expenditure of more than seven billion, a gap the Peshawar High Court has pressed administrators to explain, summoning the HEC chairman over unpaid pensions. That nonpayment is no abstraction. Retired staff have gone unpaid for months, associations warning of protests, elderly pensioners seeking help with medical bills as entitlements stopped arriving. The second rung is gone.
Travel south to Dera Ismail Khan and the story repeats in smaller frame. Gomal University, the province’s second oldest, has lurched between protest camps and one-time rescues. Pensioners went unpaid for fourteen months, then four more, camping outside the GPO for money the university admitted it held but had diverted, and some, by their own account, died still waiting. Relief came only in 2025, when a grant of nearly one point eight billion rupees, released by the then chief minister’s intervention, cleared a decade of arrears. Within a year that had already frayed, retirees again reporting only half their pensions paid, the university’s once proud interprovincial enrolment visibly thinned.
What is harder to defend is what has happened on staffing while money ran short. A 2019 inspection found expenditure rising by more than two billion over twelve years, driven substantially by recruitment without need assessment, even as pension liabilities spiraled. Support staff have expanded far beyond what crumbling laboratories and understocked libraries could justify, universities unable to pay pensioners nonetheless expanding payrolls while research withers. Selection boards, meant to insulate hiring from exactly this kind of after the fact unpicking, have instead become recurring sites of controversy, with committees now formed to review caretaker era appointments.
The legislative rung is scarcely sturdier. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Universities Act of 2012 has been amended repeatedly, most recently in 2024, each amendment shifting power between government and university. The Chief Minister now serves as Chancellor and effective appointing authority for vice chancellors, a system meant to broaden input but which concentrates the decision in the executive’s hands, with four-year terms and a midterm review that creates a recurring point of political leverage rather than genuine accountability.
Beneath this sits the absence of any proper service structure. A teacher or employee entering a KP university today cannot say with confidence how promotion will be earned or what protects against arbitrary transfer. Career progression depends on discretion and patronage rather than predictable rungs of its own, and it is one thing to wait for a delayed salary where advancement is fair, quite another with no sense whether merit will be rewarded at all.
All this converges on the rung that matters most, the quality of education delivered. Recruitment has been relaxed in places to fill posts quickly rather than well, examinations and admissions occasionally adjusted to accommodate pressure rather than uphold requirement, each exception leaving a precedent the next could cite. Nobody sets out to lower a university’s standard. It happens through a hundred small accommodations until the weight of exceptions becomes indistinguishable from policy, and a province that lets this shift complete will wake to find only buildings that issue degrees.
None of these five rungs, funding, administration, legislation, service structure and academic standards, is missing by accident, and none can be repaired alone. Restoring even one would help. Restoring all five is what a ladder actually requires, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s political leadership has yet to show it understands the difference.
It would be unfair to close without the case made by those who insist the picture is not so uniformly bleak. Provincial officials point to the ten-billion-rupee grant, the clearing of pension arrears, and plans for solarization and digitization as evidence the government has recognized the crisis, however belatedly. Some argue recruitment expansion reflects genuine growth in enrolment and a legitimate attempt to widen access in underserved districts. Defenders of the amended Act contend that a stronger role for elected government is the only realistic route to accountability in institutions long run with too little oversight, and a decisive assembly majority could carry that logic further, dismantling what autonomy remains by having student fees deposited through banks directly into the provincial exchequer, pay and pensions managed and disbursed through the district accounts offices, and development work routed through the routine government works departments. Whether this is genuine repair or another cycle of temporary relief is a question only the next budget year will answer.
