Gone, but Still in Charge

Cardinal Wolsey was Archbishop of York for sixteen years and, by most accounts, reached his cathedral only in the last year of his life. He was busy elsewhere. In London he ran the king’s government as Lord Chancellor, and along the way he collected bishoprics and abbeys, each with its income and none with his presence. Someone lesser said the prayers in York. Someone lesser always does.
The English Church eventually gave the habit a name. Pluralism meant holding several offices at once; non-residence meant holding one without living in it. Both were defended in their day on the same grounds: the post was filled, the duties were covered, the revenue arrived on time. Reformers kept pointing to the flaw in that reasoning. In every absentee arrangement the real work falls to a deputy who carries the burden of the post and none of its authority, while the people the post exists to serve discover that the one with the power to help them is never in the room. Parliament was still legislating against the practice in 1838.
Wolsey would have recognised the notification due in Punjab on November 18.
If it extends the additional charge of one of central Punjab’s largest universities by six months, in the hands of the vice-chancellor who has already left it for another, the Church’s old problem will have found a new address. The sequence is easily told. A vice-chancellor signs a four-year contract. Before a quarter of it has run, a smaller, newer and better-funded university makes him an offer. He resigns, the resignation is accepted, and the old university, instead of receiving a successor, receives its former head back as a visitor with signing powers.
The university’s act provides for an officer designed to stand in exactly this gap: the pro-vice-chancellor. Was the panel of three senior professors that the Chancellor’s office asked for on November 2 ever sent? If it was not, one has to ask whether the gap was an oversight or a convenience.
Literature has its own account of the arrangement. In Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812), an Irish landlord prefers the drawing rooms of London to his own estate, which is left to agents who prosper from his distance. The landlord is a genial man, generous and well-meaning. The damage is done by the arrangement itself: a property with an owner on paper and nobody in practice. The tenants’ grievances cross the sea and arrive too late, or not at all.
A university needs presence even more than an estate does. Its business is decisions: a student’s disputed result, a professor’s frozen research budget, an employee’s case that has waited for a signature since the summer. Each needs a person who can be found, questioned and, if necessary, overruled. A vice-chancellor whose office, budget and ambitions lie in another city cannot be that person. He can sign. He cannot be found.
A far older ruling fits in a sentence: no man can serve two masters. The Gospel meant it as a statement about loyalty, but it holds equally as an observation about attention, the one resource the head of an institution cannot borrow. A university has to be thought about on waking and again before sleep, because its problems keep no office hours. Whoever holds it with half a mind holds it badly, however able he may be.
Meanwhile the academic calendar does not wait for the argument to end. Admissions open and close, examinations are held and results declared, budgets are drawn up, the syndicate and the senate meet, and funding bodies and regulators expect answers from someone who can give them. A campus in this condition does not stop. It drifts, deciding small things by habit and large things by delay, and a drift of six months is long enough for a graduating class to leave and an incoming one to form its first impression of what a university is.
The cost is paid in three currencies. The first is time. Files wait for a head who is somewhere else, and behind every file is a household counting its instalments. The second is candour. When authority is borrowed, and the borrower’s tenure depends on the favour of those who lent it, the faculty learn that dissent is a risk and silence is a policy, and the campus fills with whispers. How much of what is whispered about appointments, contracts and old scores is true is a matter for an independent inquiry. The whispering itself is the finding: an institution in which people lower their voices has already lost something.
The third currency is precedent, and it is the costliest. Every vice-chancellor, dean and director in the province is watching to see what a signature is worth. If a four-year contract can be set aside in its first year, and the one who set it aside is rewarded with the old post as well, then a contract in public higher education is a courtesy, not a commitment.
The strongest defence of additional charge deserves a hearing. A university cannot be left headless, and the arrangement exists for emergencies. That is exactly the point. An emergency arrangement is justified by being brief and by being followed at once by the proper remedy, and here the proper remedy is the statute’s own: appoint the pro-vice-chancellor, advertise the vice-chancellor’s post, complete the search. An interim that postpones the cure is no longer an interim. It is a decision, taken by default, about who will govern.
So follow the signatures. Someone signed the appointment. Someone accepted the resignation. Someone granted the additional charge. Someone will soon be asked to sign the extension. The search committee, the Chancellor’s office, the Higher Education Department and the commissions whose business is quality each hold one link in that chain, and so far none has explained its link in public. In a system where every decision needs many hands, responsibility can be dissolved by passing the paper along.
Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz has promised merit, transparency and institutions free of corruption. Such promises are not judged by the banners under which they were announced. They are judged by dull notifications like this one, issued without ceremony and read closely by everyone who works in the sector. A six-month extension will be taken as a message, whatever it was meant to be. Universities across the province will draw their own conclusions about whether merit is a rule or a slogan.
The alternative is three decisions, and none needs a committee. Each lies within the power of those who sign, and none depends on anyone’s goodwill but theirs. Name an eligible, unblemished senior professor as pro-vice-chancellor under the university’s act. Publish the advertisement for the vice-chancellor’s post and run the search in the open, on paper, where it can be examined. And end the additional charge, with a written explanation sought from the one who left his contract midway.
England was still legislating against the absentee incumbent in 1838. A university in Punjab cannot wait that long for the lesson. When the notification is signed, it will learn whether it has a leader or merely a letterhead.
Wolsey’s York waited sixteen years to see its archbishop. Let this university be spared the wait.