Pakistan’s ‘fake’ search committees

Pakistan today suffers from a quiet but devastating institutional fraud. We pretend to conduct global-style “searches” for leadership positions while actually running hurried bureaucratic interview exercises. Every few months newspapers announce the formation of a “search committee” for a vice chancellor, regulator, public-sector CEO, or commission chairman. The language sounds modern and meritocratic.

Yet beneath the terminology lies an outdated colonial administrative culture that neither understands talent nor knows how to identify it. Pakistan has no real search committees. It has PAS-led interview panels disguised as search committees. And this confusion is not semantic. It lies at the heart of why our universities, regulators, and public institutions continue to decay while favouritism and mediocrity flourish.

A real search committee does not sit passively waiting for applications to arrive through newspaper advertisements. It searches. Globally, serious institutions begin by asking strategic questions.

• What kind of institution are we trying to build?

• Do we need a scholar, a reformer, a fundraiser, an entrepreneur, or a global network-builder?

Only then does the process begin. The best candidates are often identified quietly, approached confidentially, and persuaded to consider the role. Search committees consult peers, study publications, examine leadership records, engage stakeholders, and map talent internationally. Interviews are only a small part of a much larger evaluation.

The question is never “Who interviewed best?” but “Who can best lead this institution for the next decade?” Pakistan’s system works in exactly the opposite way. A PAS advertisement is issued with eligibility clauses, publication counts, age limits, and procedural conditions often carefully designed around a favoured candidate.

Mountains of documents are collected. Then the real power shifts quietly to bureaucratic shortlisting. A small administrative circle decides who is “eligible?” Who is “suitable?” And who gets shortlisted? There is little transparency and almost no genuine search. No nominations are sought. No global outreach occurs. No serious effort is made to identify distinguished Pakistanis abroad. The system simply waits for applications and filters them administratively. That is not a search. It is clerical processing, and often little more than rigging wrapped in procedure.

The deeper problem is that the PAS has gradually centralized control over appointments across universities, regulators, commissions, public enterprises, and even supposedly autonomous institutions. Through control of search committees, shortlisting procedures, rules, summaries, and notifications, the bureaucracy effectively controls who enters leadership positions across the state structure. Institutions that are meant to be autonomous therefore remain dependent on bureaucratic gatekeeping.

A university board cannot truly shape a university if it cannot independently search for and recruit leadership. Regulators cannot become independent if their leadership pipeline remains controlled through centralized administrative filtering. This concentration of appointment power is one of the least discussed mechanisms through which bureaucratic dominance perpetuates itself.

The state increasingly behaves as though all leadership recruitment must pass through the administrative machinery of the PAS, even in sectors where bureaucrats may possess neither domain expertise nor institutional understanding. The result is predictable: institutions begin to resemble administrative departments rather than centers of innovation, inquiry, or professional excellence.

The absurdity becomes even greater at the interview stage. Individuals who may have spent forty years building institutions, publishing internationally, raising research funds, managing organizations, mentoring scholars, or shaping policy are reduced to a perfunctory 10-minute interview. A lifetime of achievement is compressed into a few hurried questions before committee members who are often not even specialists in the relevant field.

Little evidence exists that anyone has seriously studied the candidate’s institutional vision, management philosophy, or reform agenda. The process rewards bureaucratic familiarity, political comfort, and network connections more than demonstrated leadership. This mentality is deeply colonial in origin. British administration in India was designed to maintain order, not discover excellence.

It valued hierarchy, paperwork, controllability, and procedural defensibility. Pakistan inherited that structure almost intact. Over time, institutions internalized the idea that leadership selection is merely an administrative exercise. Bureaucracies naturally distrust independent-minded reformers because reformers disrupt existing arrangements. The result is a system that repeatedly selects safe, manageable, and compliant candidates rather than ambitious institution-builders. Mediocrity becomes institutionalized through procedure.

The damage extends far beyond universities. Weak leadership produces weak hiring. Weak hiring produces weak departments. Weak departments produce weak teaching and weak research. Weak research produces weak policy, weak governance, and weak growth. Pakistan then spends decades complaining about brain drain, poor rankings, unemployable graduates, low innovation, and institutional decay without recognizing that the problem often begins with how leadership itself is selected.

Leadership is not ceremonial; it is developmental. A country that cannot identify and recruit talent cannot build modern institutions. Real reform requires abandoning the fiction that procedural formality equals merit. Pakistan needs genuine search mechanisms that actively identify talent rather than merely process applications. It needs independent governing boards, stakeholder consultation, professional search support, transparent shortlisting, and a clear separation between search and interview functions.

Most importantly, appointments must evaluate institutional vision and leadership capacity instead of reducing decades of achievement to a short interview before a bureaucratically managed panel. The tragedy is ultimately intellectual. Institutions supposedly dedicated to inquiry and excellence do not understand one of the most basic principles of modern governance: talent must be searched for, not merely interviewed. Pakistan borrowed the term “search committee” while retaining the colonial interview board. That confusion may explain far more about our institutional stagnation than most policy debates are willing to admit.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026