UNIVERSITIES are hailed as bastions of intellect—spaces where knowledge thrives, reason prevails and progress is inevitable.
Yet, this ideal is nothing more than a carefully crafted illusion.
Beneath the polished rhetoric of academic excellence lies a grim reality: power is wielded to exploit rather than educate and silence is systematically enforced.
For thousands of students, university life is not a journey of intellectual awakening but a quiet, daily negotiation with fear.
Harassment is not an anomaly within these institutions; it is embedded in their very fabric, lurking behind the unchecked authority of faculty, the complicity of the administration and the paralysis of a society that still struggles to acknowledge the reality of power-driven abuse.
The latest scandal at the University of Malakand is not an exception—it is a pattern, a recurrence so familiar that its shock has worn off.
Every few months, a new case surfaces: students find the courage to speak, institutions feign concern, committees are formed, investigations stall and life moves on.
The accused remain in their offices, the victims retreat into silence and the system—predatory, impenetrable, indifferent—remains intact.
Bahauddin Zakariya University in 2020, Quaid-i-Azam University in 2013—just two among countless others where the same dark reality has unfolded, often without making headlines.
The specifics may differ, but the pattern remains disturbingly familiar.
Faculty members, entrusted with shaping young minds, instead exploit their authority to coerce and silence.
For students—whose futures hinge on grades, recommendations and research opportunities—resistance is not just difficult; it is dangerous.
The cost of speaking out often far outweighs the suffering of staying silent.
Those who refuse to comply, who challenge this unspoken tyranny, face consequences more devastating than the abuse itself: character assassination, academic sabotage, and social ostracization.
In these institutions, the true lesson is clear—conform or be crushed.
The tragedy is not merely that harassment exists—it is that it thrives under the very structures meant to prevent it.
Pakistan’s legal framework, including the Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act (2010), offers a mirage of protection.
The Higher Education Commission mandates anti-harassment committees in universities, yet these bodies, often packed with insiders loyal to the administration, serve more as shields for the institution than as avenues for justice.
Universities, ever fearful of bad publicity, act not to protect victims but to protect reputations.
The result?
A system in which survivors are forced to fight their battles alone, against both their abusers and entire institutional machinery designed to wear them down.
The fear of retaliation silences many, turning victims into passive spectators of their own injustice.
When institutions prioritize reputation over accountability, they create an ecosystem where abuse thrives unchecked.
But harassment in academia is not only about physical misconduct.
It is also about the slow, insidious erosion of dignity through psychological and intellectual subjugation.
The verbal humiliation, the favoritism, the quiet exclusion of those who refuse to conform—it all serves the same purpose: to remind students, especially women, that they exist in these spaces on borrowed legitimacy.
A young woman, brilliant and ambitious, is made to second-guess her worth, not because she lacks intellect, but because she refuses to entertain the advances of those who hold power over her future.
A student from a marginalized background, eager to prove himself, discovers that in this system, merit is not the currency that matters.
There is no solution without accountability.
Universities must not only implement but internalize a zero-tolerance policy toward harassment.
Anti-harassment bodies must be independent, composed not of internal faculty but of legal experts, psychologists, and civil society representatives, with the power to act rather than merely observe.
Transparency must replace secrecy—every case must be documented, every finding made public, and every perpetrator held accountable.
The reporting process must be safe, accessible, and immune to retaliation, so that victims do not have to weigh the cost of seeking justice against the certainty of academic ruin.
Faculty hiring must prioritize not only credentials but moral and ethical integrity, ensuring that educators act as mentors, not predators.
The battle against harassment in academia is not just about individual cases—it is a fight for the soul of our intellectual institutions.
A university that fails to protect its students is not an institution of learning but a sanctuary of impunity.
Accountability must replace secrecy, and silence must no longer be the default response.
If Pakistan aspires to progress, it must begin by reclaiming its campuses from the shadows of fear and coercion.
The cost of inaction is not just the suffering of individuals—it is the erosion of academic integrity, moral authority, and the very purpose of education itself.
—The writer is a researcher and columnist.(zakir9669@gmail.com)
