Time is Capital, but our society is so prosperous in this capital that it wastes it without concern
- If you want to witness a perfectly engineered system of time wastage, step into any university
Waqar Mehmood
Benjamin Franklin once said, “Time is Capital.” But our society is so prosperous in this capital that it wastes it without concern. If you want to witness a perfectly engineered system of time wastage, step into any university. You will see how, under the guise of academia, bureaucracy disciplines students not for intellectual growth but for compliance, ensuring that time is not spent productively but rather exhausted in a loop of redundant procedures.
A few days ago, an incident perfectly illustrated this phenomenon. A student I know failed a single paper, yet they had enough credit hours to move to the next semester. However, the administration ruled otherwise: they must pass the subject before advancing, meaning they will spend an entire semester studying just one subject while their peers move forward with research. This is not just inefficiency; it is a Foucauldian exercise of power—one that disciplines students by controlling their academic progression, keeping them in a state of bureaucratic liminality.
Last year, when I applied for my bachelor’s degree, I underwent what I now call the “bureaucratic baptism of knowledge”
But this is merely a fragment of a much larger system. A single signature from a chairperson or an attestation from a gazetted officer can consume an entire day. A syllabus requiring no more than ten lectures is stretched into six months, and even then, some parts remain incomplete. The university, much like Foucault’s panopticon, functions as an institution of surveillance and discipline, where students are conditioned to accept inefficiency as a norm rather than resist it.
Read: Merit or My Writ in Higher Education Institutions
Last year, when I applied for my bachelor’s degree, I underwent what I now call the “bureaucratic baptism of knowledge.” The process took one and a half months and cost six thousand rupees. When I finally received the degree, I handed it over for verification—only to have the same degree, issued moments ago, scrutinized by the very system that had just produced it. This verification, of course, required additional time and another four thousand rupees. In that moment, I understood why so many are overwhelmed by this machinery: it is not about knowledge but about control, about teaching individuals to navigate a maze of inefficiency rather than question its existence.
Students come in pursuit of knowledge, yet they are taught, first and foremost, how to waste time
Foucault argued that institutions do not merely provide knowledge; they regulate it. Universities, in this sense, are not spaces of enlightenment but of biopolitical regulation—they do not only educate but manage students’ lives, dictating their pace of progress through arbitrary barriers. The power of bureaucracy lies in its ability to structure time itself, to turn knowledge into a privilege accessible only through endless procedural endurance.
And yet, this time-wasting machinery is not confined to academia. It is a social phenomenon, deeply embedded in the way we function. But in universities, the absurdity is particularly stark: students come in pursuit of knowledge, yet they are taught, first and foremost, how to waste time.
Read: Managing HEC Degree Attest Tension
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Waqar Mehmood is MPhil student in anthropology at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad and currently researching the informal apprenticeship and out-of-school children in Pakistan. His previous work was focused on learning poverty and the effects of the 2022 floods on education. His research interests include education, socioeconomic mobility, and skill development, particularly in Sindh.
Agree
So true. its all we go through.