IIUI Financial Crunch: who is responsible?

Are we broken or near to it and how deep our financial crisis at IIUI is? It is quite a genuine and legitimate question which everyone should ask from IIUI top administration which is partly responsible for the financial crunch which we are currently experiencing. No doubt that some external factors (grant cuts, inflation etc.) have aggravated the situation but we could not even see the traces of financial prudence and due diligence on the part of our administration and now everyone is crying about deep fiscal depression and mini-recession. The President of the university is now desperate and the other day he has been trying to build his case before Senate’s Standing Committee members. Not only this, earlier he has categorically said that university employees would not be given the pay rise announced in the Federal Budget unless additional grant is released. We fully appreciate his concerns and perhaps trying to apprehend too!

But one wonders that why is it that university employees are always taken into confidence when there are difficult times and financial crisis? There have been good rather very good times when our bosses were blindly expanding academic programs and administrative cadre. We are surely the victims of crazy and irrational expansion policies whereby several departments and programs were started without considering long term financial implications. And here is the time to face the music! IIUI employees had never been taken into confidence about university’s financial health earlier when resources were readily available. Those resources were largely used in an irresponsible and reckless way for expansive and unnecessary contractual appointments across the university. Millions of rupees are reportedly being spent on contractual appointees every month. Most of these appointments are merely “accommodative” in nature and we don’t have any mechanism to ensure quality control when it comes to contractual appointment process in IIUI.

There is no doubt that certain contractual appointments are inevitable in any institution and so is the case of IIUI. But there is absolutely no justification of having an excessive cohort of contractual appointees who frequently switch their jobs by leaving regrettable gaps in institutional memories. There are numerous examples around but for the sake of brevity we’ll share just one here. The positions of vice president (academics) and vice president (planning & administration) are extremely crucial for IIUI. Unfortunately over the last many years we are having ad-hoc or contractual arrangements against these positions and the result is obvious. There is standard story: someone is appointed on contract; works for a limited time and then leaves along with expertise and understanding of the system which is developed over the time and then another person comes and the same cycle continues. The result is that we don’t have a single regular employee of IIUI who is now trained and capacitated to assume these positions—this is at least what out bosses think!!

So the bottom line is about asking and raising critical question of who is responsible for existing financial crunch. IIUI community should not suffer for the mismanagement and maladministration of a few. Those who have manipulated and abused both powers and resources should be clearly identified and isolated at the juncture of this debate in the IIUI and the rest of us should hold them liable and accountable for this mess.