LUMS Is His Most Powerful Achievement—and Also the Most Politically Contested
In 1983, Syed Babar Ali identified what he considered a shortage of qualified professional managers in Pakistan and proposed creating a world-class university. LUMS records that Abdul Razak Dawood supported the idea, the National Management Foundation was assembled in 1984, and the university received its charter in 1985. Syed Babar Ali became Pro-Chancellor in 1986. The university’s own historical record also says that its founding values centred on hard work, integrity, excellence and merit.
This was not merely another college building with a gate, a registrar and a degree-printing machine. LUMS introduced case-based management education, built research capacity, expanded into science and engineering and developed into one of the institutions that international audiences now associate with Pakistani higher education. Its National Outreach Programme says it has inducted more than 1,625 scholars, produced over 1,215 graduates and seen more than 65 recipients proceed to international scholarships. Those numbers do not magically erase the financial and cultural barriers that still surround elite education in Pakistan, but they do complicate the lazy claim that LUMS has done nothing except educate rich children behind DHA walls.
And this is where the public argument becomes uncomfortable.
Criticism of LUMS is legitimate. Its faculty can be criticised. Its ideological climate can be criticised. Its speakers, political events, social-science assumptions and occasional disconnect from ordinary Pakistani sentiment can all be criticised. I have myself argued that Pakistan should be mature enough to distinguish difficult political debate from ethnic reflex in LUMS, Mohsin Dawar and the Punjabi Question.
But calling an entire university a “factory of terrorists” or a “breeding ground for insurgency” is not analysis merely because somebody typed it angrily on social media. That is an allegation requiring evidence. A controversial seminar is not an armed camp. A professor whose politics you dislike is not proof of an institutional conspiracy. And a Baloch student discussing state policy is not automatically an insurgent.
The opposite mistake is equally stupid: pretending universities are ideologically neutral spaces without institutional cultures of their own. They are not. Universities shape language, elite networks and political assumptions. LUMS should therefore be scrutinised precisely because it is influential. But scrutiny means evidence, not slogans.
The Pakistani position should be confident enough to challenge LUMS without inventing crimes for it, and confident enough to defend open intellectual inquiry without treating every fashionable academic ideology as sacred revelation.
The Aitchison College Episode Revealed Something Important About His Institutional Instinct
One of the most revealing episodes associated with Syed Babar Ali came not from Packages or LUMS, but from Aitchison College.
The principal at the centre of the 2024 controversy was Michael A. Thomson, whose name was sometimes rendered differently in news reporting. Dawn reported that he resigned amid a governance dispute after the Punjab governor approved leave and a complete fee waiver for the children of then federal minister and former bureaucrat Ahad Cheema. Thomson’s resignation letter argued that politics and nepotism had no place in schools and criticised what he regarded as policy being manufactured to accommodate particular individuals.
Syed Babar Ali had already resigned on February 6, 2024, from his role as chairman of the Aitchison College Board of Governors’ management committee, formally citing health and advanced age. His letter praised Thomson’s contribution to the institution, and the timing naturally led to wider speculation that the governance dispute was also relevant, although that interpretation should remain an inference rather than be rewritten as a proven motive.
This matters because Pakistan’s institutional crisis rarely begins with a dramatic coup against a school, company or university. It begins with exceptions.
One exception for an influential person. One seat. One waiver. One transfer. One appointment. One rule quietly rewritten because the applicant knows somebody.
Then another.
Then the exception becomes the system.
A country cannot demand merit from poor children while teaching the powerful that every rule has a private back door. Whatever one thinks of Syed Babar Ali, the governance principle raised during the Aitchison dispute is larger than the individuals involved: institutions stop being institutions when rules become negotiable according to social rank.
That lesson is brutally relevant to Pakistan.
