The recent tragic suicide of a fifth-semester pharmacy student, Mr Awais Sultan, at the University of Lahore has raised urgent and unsettling questions about Pakistan’s higher education system. What drives students to such despair on our campuses? Where does responsibility lie? And, most critically, what structural reforms are required to prevent such tragedies from recurring?
Drawing on our collective experience of teaching, supervising, and administrating in multiple higher education institutions, we argue that this tragedy cannot be reduced to an isolated incident or an individual psychological failure. It is instead indicative of deeper institutional, social, and pedagogical breakdowns.
First, the admissions regime in high-revenue-generating academic programs prioritises quantity over suitability. Admission tests rarely assess whether students possess the aptitude or motivation required for specific disciplines. Instead, institutional incentives favour maximising enrollment, including through self-finance schemes that admit students who may not meet academic thresholds. This structural misalignment between student capacity and program demands gradually produces academic stress, burnout, and emotional exhaustion. Many students remain silent about their distress because of parental expectations and the financial sacrifices invested in their education.
Second, universities increasingly evaluate faculty performance through fluctuating admission statistics rather than teaching quality or research output. As a result, classrooms that should generate dialogue, mentorship, and intellectual growth become overshadowed by institutional anxiety. When admissions decline, responsibility is reflexively shifted onto teachers, which reinforces a culture of blame rather than pedagogical reflection.
Third, faculty hiring practices often prioritise cost efficiency over academic commitment. Universities tend to recruit visiting or retired faculty on minimal contractual terms, leading to a teaching culture oriented toward time serving rather than student transformation. When academic staff are disengaged from research, mentoring, and innovation, students lose access to meaningful intellectual guidance and academic belonging.
Although the contemporary university landscape is saturated with branding narratives, it lacks spaces that promote self-reflection, dialogue, and emotional literacy.
Fourth, another structural weakness that this tragedy exposes is the absence of professional certification for university teaching in Pakistan. At present, possession of a subject degree is treated as a sufficient qualification for teaching, while pedagogical competence, student psychology, and mental health awareness are largely ignored.
Fifth, students are increasingly isolated in digitally saturated environments. Excessive engagement with social media, streaming platforms, and algorithmic comparison culture promotes unrealistic standards of success and lifestyle. Continuous exposure to idealised images of achievement and attractiveness cultivates feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and psychological vulnerability. At the same time, family bonds and social support systems are weakening, leaving many students emotionally disconnected despite being constantly online.
Finally, although the contemporary university landscape is saturated with branding narratives, it lacks spaces that promote self-reflection, dialogue, and emotional literacy. Institutions celebrate their QS and THE rankings while neglecting the inner lives of students. We believe that responsibility is distributed across multiple actors, including parents who project unfulfilled ambitions onto their children, teachers constrained by institutional pressures, peers embedded in competitive cultures, and university administrations driven by revenue models. In this context, the acknowledgement by Mr Awais Rauf, Chairman of the Board of Governors at the University of Lahore, that institutional responsibility must be accepted and addressed through long-term reforms is a crucial step forward.
The online reactions to this death quickly took on a distinctly populist tone. In Facebook and YouTube comment sections, the tragedy was no longer treated as an individual act of despair but reframed as evidence of a corrupt and predatory system crushing an ordinary young man. The digital citizens cast the university as an unaccountable elite and the student as a symbol of betrayed youth, while turning grief into moral outrage and suspicion into collective judgment. In this digital court of public opinion, official statements were dismissed, CCTV footage was distrusted, and viral clips were elevated as truth. What emerged was not simply sympathy for a life lost, but a powerful populist narrative in which institutions were presumed guilty, and the people alone were seen as the custodians of justice.
The central challenge now is not whether reform is necessary, but how urgently it must be implemented. Universities must recognise that academic success cannot be sustained in environments that ignore emotional well-being. Admission policies must be aligned with student aptitude, faculty must be trained in psychological awareness, and campuses must be designed as communities of care rather than merely sites of credential production and commercialisation.
In most advanced higher education systems, academic staff are required to complete formal certification in university teaching, covering learning theory, assessment literacy, classroom communication, and student wellbeing. Without such training, teachers may be intellectually competent yet pedagogically unprepared to recognise distress, disengagement, or silent suffering among students. Introducing mandatory teaching certification would professionalise academic instruction, improve classroom care, and transform universities from examination-driven institutions into learning and caring centres.
This tragedy is not only the University of Lahore’s burden. It is a national warning. Pakistan’s higher education system must either evolve into a humane and intellectually supportive ecosystem or continue to produce silent crises behind the façade of academic achievement.
The first author is a Professor of English at Riphah International University, Lahore. He is a lead guest editor at Emerald and Springer publishing.
The second author is an Assistant Professor of English at Govt. Graduate College for Women, Samanabad, Lahore