NO one denies that outrageous incidents occur within our universities, sometimes making national news.
Examples include professors demanding sexual favours for better grades, male students creating fake, explicit AI images of female students, and administrators or low-level employees using hidden cameras for blackmail. Social media magnifies all this by a thousand, maybe a million. My internet search shows that some salacious on-sale videos can be viewed for only Rs100. Each scandal inevitably triggers public outrage that peaks and then fades.
Rightly speaking, university administrators should swiftly investigate and appropriately punish teachers or students. Unfortunately, this is rare. However, officials cannot always be held responsible because female students are usually too afraid to testify, fearing damage to their reputations even if they had been trapped and were guiltless. In a heavily patriarchal society with skewed power relationships, what can they do?
Media lynching — such as the recent sting operation at Bahawalpur University — is therefore seen as an alternative. Carried out by a popular TV channel, its viewership must have skyrocketed. The university’s authorities had, as expected, waffled. But is justice truly served by cameras chasing some bad-guy professor? One can be doubtful.
True injustice occurs, however, when these instances are weaponised by reactionary voices. They rush to seize a megaphone, multiply fears, ignite lurid sexual fantasies and declare the coed university as a den of sin and temptation disallowed by religious and cultural mores. See, they say, let the sexes intermingle and bay-hayaee (immorality) is what you get.
Reports of sexual misconduct are weaponised to enforce segregation and oppose coeducation.
The impact of such propaganda in a conservative society can only be imagined. In the aftermath of even a single incident, we cannot ever know how many hundreds of daughters were disallowed by their fathers or brothers from enrolling at some coed campus or being withdrawn from one.
A frequently proposed solution is to have more women-only universities. This is a dead end. I’ve guest lectured at several and to call them universities is a travesty. Perhaps they could be better described as female safe houses or custodial centres where minds must be sheltered and dulled, not challenged and sharpened.
What about going the Taliban way, and banning female education altogether? Even with the explosive growth of Pakistani conservatism, the near parity of male-female enrolment (100-96) in tertiary education suggests that urbanites do not want this extreme. Universities — whose revenues depend on enrolment — tread cautiously.
As a way out, worried officials aim to reassure fathers and brothers (mothers rarely matter) by increasing segregation through strict moral policing. Official circulars are periodically issued that threaten violators with fines, denial of entry on campus, withholding of semester results, or expulsion. But how do they define morality?
Official websites do not list as ‘immoral’ crimes like theft, academic cheating, plagiarism or vandalism. Similarly, harassment and violence against different ethnic and religious groups, or disrupting cultural and music festivals, are not classified as immoral. Depending on who’s in charge, some officials disallow such actions while others secretly or openly endorse them.
Immorality, however, revolves around female attire. While none can deny that clothing should be ‘modest’, its meaning varies from city to city and campus to campus. Back in the early 1970s, when I started my university teaching career, the number of female students at Quaid-e-Azam University in burqa were fewer than the fingers on one hand. Today they are the majority, followed by the less restrictive hijab, while those without head cover are outliers.
Morality also comes under threat when a female walks by herself (hence becomes vulnerable), engages in casual conversations with male students, or makes friends across the divide. This is less emphasised at institutions like Lums whose official policy merely forbids PDA (public display of affection) such as the holding of hands. But within that same city is Punjab University (PU), a once-decent relic from British times.
Now better known for hyperactive moral squads than for scholarly accomplishments, PU is the headquarters of the Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba. IJT denounces coeducation and has physically attacked couples found sitting together on the university’s lawn or benches. Some teachers and officials make no secret of their support for such actions.
Modernity is impacting every country’s values and eliciting different responses. Turkiye, Morocco and Bangladesh have liberal campuses, much more so than ours. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now outpacing even them. Whether or not de-segregation has full popular support, this is what their autocratic rulers have decided. On the other hand, even under Iran’s strict clerical rule, the cruel death in custody of 22-year-old anti-hijab activist Mahsa Amini led to countrywide protests, suggesting that change is inevitable.
Modernity is also changing Pakistan but far slower than elsewhere. Our conservatives still don’t want wives and daughters to work, but their opposition has diminished now that females in one out of five families have outside jobs. Despite all efforts to minimise contact between genders, full segregation is proving impossible.
The Pakistani diaspora in Britain, now into its third generation, remains backward and stuck in a quandary. Many parents, fearing corruption, resist sending their children to British coed schools. This makes for awkwardness in a society that treasures equality of men and women. Even more seriously, this puts many Pak-Brits at the bottom of the social heap for lack of skills and knowledge. Attitudes towards females, derived from enforcing school segregation, can show up late in life.
Islamophobic forces in Britain have long derived strength from grooming gang sex scandals that, much more than other immigrants, implicate British-Pakistani men. While the far right’s claims are exaggerated to suit its political agenda, Pakistanis familiar with male attitudes towards females in general, and white girls in particular, say: where there’s smoke there’s fire.
Gender-related crimes on campus — or elsewhere for that matter — have no easy solution. Would restricting women to female-only workplaces restore purity and virtuousness? Would banning all contact between males and females eliminate sexual misconduct on our coed campuses?
Very likely, this would — just as banning all cars and motorbikes would eliminate traffic accidents. However, travelling on horses and camels is not a price that many, including conservatives, are willing to pay.
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist and writer.
Published in Dawn, September 6th, 2025
