EVER since I wrote about the vision statements of our leading institutions of higher education (‘‘V’ is for vision’, Dawn, Sept 21, 2025), I have been thinking of what ought to replace them. The notion of vision needs clarity. Instead of delineating a direction for the future most vision statements, for example, that students serve humanity or fight for justice, enunciate noble wishes. Such unfulfilled wishes point to conceptual problems that need diagnosis and redressal.
It helps to distinguish between an objective, a vision, and a wish. This can be illustrated with reference to the country. In the 1940s, there was an objective — creation of a new nation-state. Its vision — whether it would be a religious or a secular state — was unclear from the beginning (hence the later costs). The wish (elusive to this day) was that all citizens of the new state would consider themselves Pakistanis first.
The same template applies to educational institutions. Suppose City B lacks a business school like the one in City A. This yields an objective — setting up a business school in City B. Next, this school needs a vision — for example, should it be a carbon copy of the one in City A or something radically different; standalone or interdisciplinary; research or teaching focused; English or Urdu medium; for the poor or the rich? There are no right or wrong choices but clearly the vision matters in terms of a whole host of consequences — nature of student body, type of faculty, curriculum, expansion path, etc.
It follows that the institutional visions reflect and reinforce aspirations of the students attracted. Privileged students paying high fees for globally oriented training in English are unlikely to want to serve in developing countries. To believe otherwise is to ignore an obvious mismatch.
Choice of vision is crucial at the institutional level.
The same logic holds if the objective is to set up an arts institute. The institutional vision entails deciding, among other things, whether the focus would be on indigenous traditions or on global trends or some combination thereof. The choice will manifest itself, for example, in whether a local master craftsperson is accorded the same recognition as a lecturer with a foreign qualification.
The key takeaway is that the choice of vision is of crucial importance but at the institutional level; that conscious choice has a bearing on the nature of the student body, type of faculty, and curricula. In its absence, a wish for what graduates ought to do exists in a vacuum. More so because the latter is a function of many other factors not in control of institutions — parental pressures, the job market, security conditions, respect for merit, tolerance of dissent, etc.
Institutions of higher learning train students for various professions — doctors, architects, etc — which is a valid part of their mandate. But they also need to ‘educate’ students so that the latter are able to think for themselves, to understand the society to which they belong, and to question the legitimacy, fairness and morality of their world. Only then can one hope that they might choose to do what institutions wish them to. Even then it is only a hope.
For this, educators need to extend their concerns beyond institutions of higher learning — they need to lobby for better school education that feeds their institutions. If school education strangulates independent thinking no amount of college education can reverse the damage. It is equally important to accept that student attitudes and aspirations are shaped by what they see around them not what they are told in class — decades of ever-expanding religious studies should disabuse us of that delusion.
And if institutions teach only in English and rely on high fees, they have a self-selected combination — privileged, mostly culturally isolated students facilitated to emigrate at the earliest opportunity. The lament that visions remain unfulfilled because skilled students (especially males) wish to leave the country is, once again, oblivious to the contradiction between structural choices and desired outcomes.
What is needed after decent school education is public funding of institutions of higher learning to ensure that at least half the student body is comprised of smart students otherwise kept out by language or money. Such a class mix would trigger manifold positive changes in cultural outlooks, social integration, and mutual understanding among students and in the alignment of institutions with the needs of the places where they are located.
An explicit institutional vision that spells out who and what an institution is for must precede a listing of what students ought to do. Its absence is a leading cause of why institutions have failed to deliver on the wishes they have articulated. It is time for a revision.
The writer is the author of What We Get Wrong About Education in Pakistan.
Published in Dawn, November 13th, 2025
