LAHORE – A close bonding between Punjab University Vice Chancellor (VC) Dr Mujahid Kamran and the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba (IJT) has been exposed. The PU vice chancellor and his administration have joined hands with Jamiat to malign one of the PU’s finest academic institutions, the Punjab University College of Information Technology (PUCIT) and its Principal Dr Syed Mansoor Sarwar, due to his stand against the VC on various administrative malpractices. The PUCIT principal and some members of the Syndicate have spoken openly against several illegal decisions and policies of the vice chancellor including illegal hiring of teachers and staff, illegal approval of PhD synopses, illegal holding of the meetings of the PU statutory bodies as a look-after in-charge of the post of the VC, workplace harassment of PU faculty and staff, and continuously deteriorating academic peace at the university as well as decline in all meaningful quality parameters related to teaching and research at PU. The PU administration directed the IJT on July 29 to upload on its Facebook account a pro-forma against the successful entrance test conducted by the PUCIT on July 24 for its BS and MSc programs, and have it emailed to the VC and the registrar with fake identities between July 29 and Aug 2. The VC forwarded hardcopies of four such emails to the PUCIT principal for his comments on July 29 (Friday). The principal received them on August 1 (Monday). Three of these emails had exactly the same content that the IJT had published on its Facebook account. The next day (on Aug 2), the PU registrar wrote a letter to Dr Sarwar that the PU look-after VC had received 86 “alleged” complaints against the conduction of the entrance test and that the look-after VC had “decided to” form a fact finding committee.Interestingly, the registrar’s letter too contained exactly the same content that the IJT had published on its website: On the very next day (Aug 3), the chairman of the fact finding committee, DrAbidHussain of the Institution of Education and Research (IER) also wrote to the PUCIT principal regarding the same issue. The PUCIT principal wrote to the VC that all of the allegations were false and baseless, and that the PUCIT admission process is absolutely fair, clean, and transparent.DrSarwarrequested the registrar and the chairman of the so-called fact finding committee to provide him true and verifiable copies of the alleged complaints, as well as a true copy of the notification of the committee. To date, the PU administration has not yet provided him either. The PUCIT has an exemplary system of automatic grading of entrance test answer sheets that allows them to upload the results of their entrance tests within a few hours of its conduction. The system uses specially designed answer sheets, and advanced computer vision and image processing algorithms to ensure zero error in grading. This year, 108 applicants rechecked their graded answer sheets and found not errors. In 2014, 65 applicants rechecked their answer sheets and found no errors.