Pakistan's universities face a multitude of challenges including underfunding, low enrollment, and questionable degree quality. However, one critical issue that cuts across nearly all others yet receives far less attention is the pervasive practice of running universities on ad hoc leadership. At any given time, a significant number of Pakistani universities are led not by a vice chancellor serving a full term, but by someone holding acting or additional charge—sometimes for months, often for years.
Why Universities Remain Without Permanent Leaders
This leadership vacuum primarily occurs because the selection process is deliberately delayed. In the provinces, appointments pass through a search committee, the provincial Higher Education Commission, the Higher Education Department, the Chief Minister's Office, and the Governor's Secretariat. For federal universities, the process involves the federal HEC, the Ministry of Education, and the President's Secretariat. At any of these stops, a file can sit for months, unaccounted for.
The result is what might be called 'auto-piloting.' Because the charge is temporary, so is the mandate. An acting vice chancellor cannot commit a university to anything that outlasts their own tenure—whether a multi-year academic plan, a capital project, or a hiring round with long budget implications. An acting vice chancellor's signature does not carry the weight of a regular one's, and decisions taken on that authority are liable to be reopened the moment a permanent successor arrives.
Incentives for Acting Heads: Avoiding Tough Decisions
An acting vice chancellor also has an incentive a regular one usually does not: turning a temporary charge into a longer, or even permanent, one. This shapes behaviour in fairly predictable ways. Acting heads tend to avoid decisions that make enemies, such as disciplining errant faculty, resisting pressure in admissions, or holding the line on finances. Instead, they lean towards out-of-turn promotions, regularising ad hoc appointments, and other concessions meant to buy goodwill, or at least the silence, of employee groups whose support might help later.
Who Bears the Cost of Ad Hoc Leadership?
The costs of such ad hoc arrangements fall on three groups. The university loses forward motion: strategic plans stall, quality-assurance processes lapse, and research partnerships with foreign universities go unrenewed for lack of anyone with standing authority to sign. Employees live with prolonged uncertainty: promotions and routine approvals get deferred, and in the worst cases, salaries and pensions for visiting faculty go unpaid for months because no one will sign off on the liability. Students bear the most direct and least deserved cost: degrees pile up unsigned, exam schedules and scholarships stall, and a growing number, unable to get a straight answer about who is actually in charge, choose to look abroad instead.
Court Orders and HEC Deadlines Fail to Fix the Problem
None of this is inevitable. The date on which a vice chancellor's tenure ends, and a vacancy occurs, is known years in advance, written into the appointment letter on day one. There is no apparent reason why the search for a successor cannot begin a year ahead, so that an incoming vice chancellor takes charge the week the outgoing one leaves. That this rarely happens points to something other than logistics. It suggests an absence of urgency, and sometimes a preference for a pliant acting head over an independent regular one.
The scale of the problem has been laid out, more than once, in court. In April 2024, a writ petition was filed before the Supreme Court on behalf of university teachers, submitting that a large number of the country's public universities were functioning without regular vice chancellors. The HEC's own submission to the court the following month put a firmer number on it: 66 of the country's 154 public-sector universities, or nearly 43 per cent, were without a regularly appointed head. Of the federal government's own 29 universities, five were on acting charge.
None of this was new to the court. It had already held, in Aamir Raza Ashfaq v Minhaj Ahmed Khan (2012), that 'the position of vice chancellor should not be left vacant' and that delay in such an appointment 'has an adverse effect on the functioning of the university.' The court directed the authorities to fill the vacant posts within three months. Some universities complied. Many did not.
HEC Chairman’s 2026 Letter: A Persistent Governance Failure
Two years on, the regulator has had to say much the same thing. In February 2026, HEC chairman Dr Niaz Ahmad Akhtar wrote to every university, describing the 'chronic non-filling' of vice chancellor, registrar, treasurer and faculty posts as a 'persistent governance' failure. A survey behind the letter found roughly 40 per cent of all faculty and administrative positions nationwide vacant. Universities were given until August 15, 2026 to complete recruitment, or face 'administrative and regulatory consequences.' Whether that deadline fares better than the Supreme Court's did in 2024 remains to be seen.
Case Studies: Federal Universities in Leadership Limbo
Early signs at the country's own flagship federal universities are not encouraging. One of the most prestigious universities of Pakistan, Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU), lost its vice chancellor on February 6, 2026, when Prof Niaz Ahmad Akhtar, then QAU's VC, was elevated to chairman of the HEC. For two months, QAU had no head at all, acting or otherwise. An acting vice chancellor, Prof Zafar Nawaz Jaspal, was appointed on April 7, for three months. More than five months on, QAU is still without a regular vice chancellor.
The International Islamic University, Islamabad (IIU) tells a more tangled version of the same story. Dr Masoom Yasinzai's tenure as rector ended in 2023. His successor, Dr Samina Malik, was suspended within a year after the Supreme Court declared her appointment illegal. The HEC chairman, Dr Mukhtar Ahmed, then took over as acting rector, and more than a year later there is no regular rector of IIU.
National Skills University, Islamabad, may be a case in point too, though a murkier one. Its founding vice chancellor, Prof Muhammad Mukhtar, served from 2019 until 2023, and since then the university has been run on an acting basis.
Even where the system eventually works, it rarely works quickly. The Virtual University of Pakistan got a regular rector, Prof Arshad Saleem Bhatti, in June 2026, appointed by the President for a four-year term, but only after fifteen months of interim charge that began in March 2025. If that counts as a success story, it says something about how low the bar has fallen.
A Simple Fix That Requires Political Will
None of this is difficult to fix, and it involves no additional funds. It only requires the federal and provincial governments to treat a vice chancellor's appointment as a scheduled, foreseeable event, and not a crisis to be managed after the fact. It also requires starting the search early enough that handovers happen directly, with time for a proper debriefing between an outgoing vice chancellor and the incoming one. Regularising this one process would do more for Pakistan's universities than most of the reform packages currently gathering dust.
