LAHORE: The Federation of All Pakistan Universities Academic Staff Association (FAPUASA) Saturday voiced its serious concern over an advertisement to fulfill the vacancy of the vice chancellor at University of Sahiwal wherein the condition of PhD is not mandatory and threatened to shut down universities in Punjab. In an emergency meeting, FAPUASA Punjab President Prof Dr Javed Ahmad, Central Vice President Prof Dr Shoaib Ahmed, UET TSA President Prof Dr Sohail Aftab Qureshi, Vice President Prof Dr Zafar Noon, PU syndicate members Prof Dr Sajid Rashid and Dr Mahboob Hussain and others expressed serious concern over the move to appoint non-PhDs vice chancellors at public sector universities. They said that the advertisement was tantamount to contempt of court as it had violated the Lahore High Court’s (LHC) decision regarding eligibility criteria for vice chancellors’ appointments. They said that some elements in bureaucracy were hiding true picture from the Punjab chief minister regarding appointment of vice chancellors. They said that at a previous meeting of the FAPUASA with Punjab Higher Education Department and Punjab Higher Education Commission, it was decided that FAPUASA would submit their reservations in writing and later a meeting would be held in which controversial matters would be sorted out with mutual understanding. However, the FAPUASA office-bearers said that the bureaucracy somehow managed to get controversial criteria approved without taking relevant stakeholders into confidence and published the advertisement. They said that the new eligibility criteria had ignored some very basic and vital parameters for measurement of professional excellence of an academic leader. For instance, they said no marks were given for post-doc experience and no weightage was given for university-level teaching experience. The FAPUASA said that overall in the criteria, systematically space had been created for entry of non-academic managers, which wa snot acceptable. They said that the management experience must be relevant to academic/research experience. Pointing out technical deficiencies, they said that the basic qualification for the post of VC must be PhD in relevant field of university instead of preferably PhD. The federation of teachers said that in the criteria, additional marks for MA degree and lowering basic qualification of vice chancellorship would be ridiculous and unacceptable. They said that work experience was not clear that what kind of organisation a candidate must have worked for. They suggested that the candidate must have 15 years of teaching/research experience. They said that the government must consider academic/research leadership experience of candidates rather than non-academic/non-research leadership experience. Published in Daily Times, March 25th 2018.