HEADS of universities and the organisational units within are typically more educated than the general population. Today, many are well-travelled, either because they hold one or more foreign qualifications, attend academic conferences, exchange visits, or travel officially for a number of reasons. My point is that, just like their counterparts in the more muscular parts of the civilbureaucracy, many are reasonably well aware of the broad norms and trends in academia around the world.

Despite the benefit of an above-average education and significant foreign exposure, it seems people at the helm are deliberately acting helpless, searching for excuses, and stalling on the issue of student representation. Talking to decision-makers on this issue can be exhausting because, in a stunning display of a lack of nuance, most conflate student clubs/ societies, councils/ representatives, unions, and student political wings all different things with the term `unions`.

Clubs and societies are groups that allow students with shared interests to pursue and engage in them together; they can centre around sports, skills, hobbies, subjects of study, professional interests, etc. These are the most benign forms of student organisation on this list.

Elected student councils/ representatives provide a focused representation of students at the level of programme, department, college, and university. They serve as a bridge between students and the university, communicating student feedback and concerns about academic programmes and the broader student experience. Most importantly perhaps, they are part of the university governance structure, often all the way to the university senate. Making students part of the governance structure enhances the transparency of decision-making, which filters back to the student community.

A few public universities have already established student councils and collaborative forums, but most continue to employ poorly disguised stalling tactics, for example, kicking the ball to university committees, taking forever to create election procedures, or otherwise so eager to exercise their autonomy voluntarily seeking dictation from the Higher Education Commission (HEC) on how to conduct elections.

Universities justify shying away from student representation, arguing that it is redundant because everyone is already looking out for stu-dents` interests. Anyone who is familiar with the workings of university statutory bodies and has seen their internal deliberations knows that to be false. Standing up for an issue costs political capital and representatives of various quarters can be selective even for the constituency they claim to represent, sometimes for petty personal reasons.

For evidence, most agenda items are on issues of interest to anyone but the students. In universities that have no student representation at all, introducing student councils with representatives on statutory bodies is a good, low-risk starting point.

In a judgement in October 2024, the Supreme Court clarified that there is no law standing in the way of establishing student unions in universities.

Moreover, in March 2022, the governor Sindh signed the Sindh Students Union Bill, while the KP Assembly passed a resolution to restore studentunions earlier this month. Recently, when the HEC was approached on this issue by a few universities, it kicked the ball to the vice-chancellors at a meeting in Islamabad on Jan 15. This has given universities an excuse to further delay taking action.

Student unions, as they are understood outside the Pakistani context, focus on collective student interests, are university-wide, and operate autonomously with an elected leadership. In universities that employ students in various capacities, student unions may also function as student labour unions.

Student unions represent all students of the university, without preconditions of ethnicity, beliefs, or pledged fealty. Being an elected member of a student union certainly does not entitle one to carry arms, indulge in violence or break laws.

What makes the bureaucracy and the people running universities recoil in horror when student unions are brought up is the prospect of seeing them hijacked by mainstream political parties -and not without reason. In the 1980s and 1990s, campus life in colleges and universities was routinely disrupted by clashes, physical altercations, and even violent battles fought between unsanctioned student wings of rival political parties.

`Gangs` is a more accurate way to describe these groups.

The purpose of a student union is not to wield power it is to serve the collective needs of all students. Religio-political and ethnic student groups do not serve that goal and have no business being on campuses.

For ordinary students, there was no benefit, no upside in having these gangs on campus.

Unaffiliated students lacking gang protection often found themselves victims of violence, and in extreme but not uncommon cases, physical torture. University administrators tolerated all of it, oftenunderpressure.

If the goal of attending a university programme is to get an education, it might make sense in our context to tack on preconditions of academic performance for running for student union elections to ensure they do not become the exclusive domain of the same lot we saw in the 1990s.

Why then bother with the risk of having student unions at all? Because when universities disband officially sanctioned student representation bound to operate by the rules, the vacuum it creates gets filled by something more sinister and less accountable. Although many universities have had a ban on unions for years, students have organised themselves under ethnic councils. As a result, campus life continues to suffer from sporadic clashes between rival ethnic councils. Since they are not officially recognised, they are not bound by any rules and cannot be attributed or held responsible.

All this is to say that at present, the discourse on this issue suffers from a poverty of vocabulary that is essential for a nuanced discussion everyone is using one word `unions` but it means different things. Since there is no legal barrier to student unions, the greatest contribution the HEC (and political parties) can make to the cause of each university that is working out how to achieve student representation in the service of improved programmes and campus experience, is to refrain from injecting themselves into this process. • The wnter has a PhD in education.