Dr. Mohammad Bakhtiar Rana:
For more than five decades, Bangladesh’s public universities have been less about education and more about politics. Student wings of political parties dominate campuses not with ideas or academic excellence, but with muscle power, intimidation, and violence. Instead of fostering dialogue, these groups serve as proxies for political elites, used to showcase dominance or silence opposition. The cost has been high: lives lost, campuses shut down, and the erosion of academic integrity.
The rot does not stop with students. Faculty members are often equally partisan, proudly identifying themselves by political colors. Their loyalties lie less with research and teaching, and more with party directives. Rarely do we see faculty collectively demanding better classrooms, stronger research funding, digital infrastructure, or professional development support for students.
This politicization is rooted in a dangerous perception—that the primary role of students and teachers is to serve as agents of political change rather than as scholars. Student unions and teacher associations mobilize for politics, not academics. Oversight bodies like the University Grants Commission (UGC) remain largely toothless—functioning more as fund distributors than as guardians of quality. The National Accreditation Council, meanwhile, a weak and underperforming unit, devotes its limited efforts to private universities while ignoring public ones. If our regulatory agencies neglect the very institutions funded by taxpayers, who ensures accountability?
1. The Way Forward: A Reform Agenda
Bangladesh urgently needs a Higher Education Reform Commission (HERC) with the authority to redesign structures, policies, and standards. Its tasks must include:
• National Teaching Standards: Develop and enforce comprehensive guidelines for teaching quality across public and private universities, supported by national digital systems for student feedback and teaching quality assessment.
• Student Services: Guarantee basic rights—residential facilities, digital access, academic support, and personal safety, including basic human rights.
• Campus Safety: Introduce a national code of conduct with enforcement mechanisms to curb intimidation and violence. Campus surveillance should be ensured through digital cameras and a special police battalion under the home ministry’s campus security unit. Campus safety cannot be left to professors under proctorial or VC offices; it is neither their job nor their expertise.
• Digital Platforms: Establish centralized national-level learning platforms where teaching materials and research papers are transparently shared with students by course teachers and professors.
• Faculty Career Tracks: Create clear distinctions between Teaching Professors (evaluated by student satisfaction and teaching load) and Research Professors (evaluated on international publications, journal rankings, and impact).
• Competitive Salaries: Align public university pay with private benchmarks (BDT 150,000–300,000 monthly) to attract and retain talent, particularly research professors.
• Transparent Research Evaluation: Introduce a point-based system that weighs journal rankings, quality, and contributions—ensuring merit-based funding and recognition. International journal and publisher rankings from countries such as the UK, France, Norway, Denmark, and Germany can serve as the basis for evaluation. A central evaluation committee under the National Accreditation Council could manage this system and share outcomes with university administrators. This framework could guide yearly research funding allocations from the UGC, while salary incentives for individual professors could be tied to these results.
2. Accountability in Teaching and Research
Student feedback must become central to teaching evaluations. A digital, anonymous system should track teaching effectiveness nationwide. Without accountability, education becomes hollow, degrees lose value, and students turn to politics instead of academics.
Research must also be rigorously assessed. Professors who focus on research should teach fewer courses but be held accountable for publications, grants, student supervision, and contributions to national policy. Digitized, AI-assisted research evaluations could make this process transparent and accessible.
3. Governance and Student Security
Student safety must be a non-negotiable priority. Yet many university leaders—Vice Chancellors, Deans, Department Heads—treat their positions as ceremonial. Governance should be professionalized: abolish rotations, introduce merit-based selections, and require open calls with clear job descriptions and performance indicators. Leadership roles must be filled by competent managers and academics, not political loyalists.
Universities must lead by example. Without scientific management in higher education, it is naïve to expect good governance elsewhere.
4. Politics or Knowledge Creation?
In no other country do student council elections function as extensions of national political parties. The media spectacle around them in Bangladesh is unprecedented and deeply troubling.
The purpose of student unions should be simple: ensure representation, improve housing and facilities, and liaise with administrators. In Europe, for example, student political factionalism is banned from classrooms and dormitories, though political awareness is encouraged through open discussion. Scandinavian, in particular Danish universities go further, giving students representation in academic councils, syndicates, and finance committees—a practice upheld for over 60 years.
By contrast, Bangladeshi students grapple daily with housing shortages, poor food and water, overcrowded classrooms, limited access to journals, weak transportation, irregular teaching, and neglected laboratories. These failures drive students toward politically backed groups that offer perks in exchange for loyalty.
What we need is a clear charter—a set of roles and responsibilities for students, teachers, and administrators. The Accreditation Council should track performance using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and publish an annual report card of university performance. Since public universities are funded by taxpayers, the public deserves transparency.
5. Rational and Sustainable Reform
Reform must be structural. As Alfred Chandler reminded us, “structure follows strategy.” Without structural reform, improved teaching or research will remain cosmetic. The path forward must be long-term, strategic, and shielded from partisan interests.
If we align our higher education system with global standards while tailoring it to our national context, Bangladesh can nurture graduates who are not political pawns but skilled professionals, innovative researchers, and responsible citizens.
Only then will universities reclaim their true role—not as battlegrounds of partisan politics, but as engines of knowledge and national progress.
[Writer: Dr. Mohammad Bakhtiar Rana is Associate Professor of International Business and Strategy at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is leading a major research project funded by the Danish International Development Agency. He is also the Director of the Sustainability Lab at Aalborg University Business School and has served as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge.]
