(Submitted by Rabia Najm)
I remember the exact moment the Ubaidullah Inquiry Committee Report was released because it has had a lasting impact on the way I view and experience my time at LUMS. I was walking back to my dorm from the sports complex when I got the email. I started reading it as I walked. I wasn’t fully aware of the events leading up to Ubaidullah’s passing so I skimmed down to the Timeline Section and started reading from there. Not more than a couple of paragraphs into it, I had to stop. I had to stop because in that moment I felt incredibly overwhelmed and could feel tears stinging my eyes.
While I can never claim to understand or make sense of Ubaidullah’s individual experience at LUMS, I can say that it hit closer to home than I expected it to. Our circumstances were dissimilar, but the feelings of hopelessness and being lost were a commonality, a commonality that isn’t just restricted to the two of us, but to so many students who pass through university in general.
Going to university is a very destabilizing experience. In most circumstances you have to live away from home, or learn to be independent. You have to settle into a new environment and adapt to completely different social settings. Academic stress can be crippling especially when it is accompanied by other problems such as financial or family issues. Getting used to all of this is incredibly hard, and even more so when there is no support from the institutions that should be offering it.
As a first year student, I was going through the debilitating process of learning to handle all of these problems, and in that situation to read the Inquiry Committee Report and realize that I would be getting no help or support from the institution that was supposed to be my ‘home’ for the next four years, was terribly scary. Looking at what Ubaidullah went through at LUMS made me realize that this could be me, this could be my friends, this could be anyone at LUMS and there would be no mechanism in place to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.
In desperation I scrolled through the Summary of Recommendations in the report, searching for anything that would give me some sort of hope that my peers and I weren’t alone in this anymore. And it seemed as if my hopes weren’t unfounded; there was an acceptance of institutional failings on part of the committee, a commitment to reforming how certain bodies like the Disciplinary Committee operated and a positive change in how student welfare and autonomy were perceived.
However, despite the fact that the recommendations in the report were received positively by the student body and many members of the faculty, they came to nothing because the report itself was rejected by certain higher ups in the administrative body. As it is with things like these, despite the best efforts of the people involved in the establishment of the Inquiry Committee and the report, the outrage around this tragic incident fizzled out, and Ubaidullah’s batch mates along with other concerned seniors graduated.
Towards the end of Spring 2017-18, the semester in which the report was released, a small group of students made another effort to address some of the issues highlighted in the report by writing a letter to the VC. While no official response was given to this letter, it did garner a lot of support from the LUMS student body in the form of ‘likes on LDF’ and ‘dropping down of roll numbers’, something Luminites are particularly talented at. In the following academic year, Fall 2018-2019, all attempts to reignite conversation on the ‘Letter to the VC’, and the Ubaidullah Committee Report were met with a lukewarm to non-existent response, except the usual LDF activism.
The lack of support and commitment from the student body to the implementation of the proposed reforms is rather puzzling, keeping in mind the sort of events that have unfolded on campus this year. Case in point is how the culture of surveillance and authoritarianism on campus has intensified this past academic year; from the way the M2 issue was handled to how guards with flashlights were stationed in the free parking lot. It is not to say that there hasn’t been any resistance to these policies; however the problem remains that often this resistance is sporadic, reactionary and non-constructive. It does not target the root cause of the problem which may be something like the amount of power a certain individual or office has in the administration, rather it will only target the administrative response in that particular event. While in that moment the huge backlash from the student body may payoff through a revoking of the policy, it has no impact on changing the administrative structure and mindsets behind it, and sooner or later in a similar situation, the same sort of policy is enforced again.
It is great that there was a big enough outcry against the free parking policy for it to be amended, are we going to talk about the fact that this policy is an off-shoot of the increased surveillance culture on campus? This increased surveillance has manifested itself in innocent students being harassed by guards for, smoking in certain places, being warned that they are being ‘observed’ and having their privacy breached by having their rooms broken into or entered without permission. The point here is simple, for there to be constructive long term change in administrative attitudes, our resistance needs to be well thought out and better organized. It cannot be a one- off event in which the students get angry, protest and hope for a response from the powers that be. We need to mobilize the student body to pressure the administration into accepting reforms aimed at structural changes such as the ones proposed in the Letter to the VC and Inquiry Committee Report.
It cannot be stressed enough how important it is for positive changes like these to be adopted into the administrative structure at LUMS. The type of hostile and unsafe environment that increased campus surveillance has created is terrible for the mental and emotional wellbeing of students especially for those who live on campus, and have no choice but to see it as their home. The insensitivity and callousness with which OSA handles student concerns also has the same impact on student welfare and can lead to increased alienation and feelings of helplessness in students who are already struggling. In a university setting where things like cut throat competition, academic challenges already take a huge toll on student welfare, it is imperative that the structures that should provide support be properly reformed and equipped to carry out their duties.
Events leading up to Ubaidullah’s untimely passing are a painful reminder that LUMS failed as an institution to help a student who desperately needed some show of empathy. The Ubaidullah Inquiry Committee Report has had a defining impact on my time at LUMS because it made me realize that there are other students in LUMS who struggled like me, and some of them were not lucky enough to find the type of informal support networks that I did. No one deserves to feel so lost and directionless that everyday functioning becomes hard, and life becomes a bit less livable to the point that it leads to a spiral that is impossible to pull up from. Our failure as a community played a role in the mental anguish that Ubaidullah Lodhi went through; we owe it to him to make sure it doesn’t happen again to any other student.