The birth pang of a university

As the Chinese word for "crisis," wei ji (danger and opportunity), suggests, we do not need to see all crises as catastrophes but as thresholds for reinvention. The standoff over the seven government colleges formerly affiliated with Dhaka University (DU) offers one such moment. The problem, which started as a protest against DU administration, evolved into a decoupling process that promised the establishment of a new university.

Dhaka Central University (DCU) was hurriedly conceived and delivered under pressure, with authorities now struggling to start classes after admissions, to formalise its ordinances, and to decide on the existing cadres of teachers. These crises have pushed the limits of our inherited university model and now require the urgent need to craft alternatives. The seven colleges— Dhaka College, Eden Mohila College, Begum Badrunnesa Government College, Government Bangla College, Kabi Nazrul Government College, Government Titumir College, and Government Shaheed Suhrawardy College—have operated under shifting jurisdictions. Their status as degree colleges was initially governed by DU, then by the National University, and returned to DU in 2017. On the surface, such a shift was an attempt to fix dysfunctions in governance, examinations, and staffing, but the hasty decision hints at a foundational flaw related to the current situation. The uncertainty surrounding the future of students, faculty, and staff may prompt the interim government to implement temporary solutions. But let us not waste this "crisis" to address the deeper design flaws experienced by our universities. It is time for the new university to move beyond colonial-era templates and focus on our demographic, social, epistemic, and economic realities.

In a provocatively titled book, Dark Academia: How Universities Die, Peter Fleming diagnoses some of the ills of late capitalism for the conceptual death of universities. Fleming argues that the factory model of education, which insists on auditing, key performance indicators, and metrics while pursuing ranking, sustainability, and competitiveness, simply serves a corporate bureaucracy and undermines academic freedom. The mechanical process takes the soul out of the universities and turns the institutions lifeless. More and more, universities have become self-referential machines incapable of adaptation. The question before us is whether or not we want the new university as an extension of the colonial legacy from which the seven colleges want to liberate themselves.

Dhaka University, like its peers—Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras University—was established not to cultivate public intellect but mostly to produce clerks who would run and reinvigorate the administrative machinery of the British Empire. DU's colonial mindset persists in its obsession with BCS exams and its claim to produce almost half of the country's civil servants. Structurally, the university, along with its public counterparts, maintains a hierarchical administrative system and discipline-bound departments. People worldwide raise questions about this structure's ability to meet current demands.

The University Grants Commission (UGC), which oversees all universities, maintains ties to this colonial structure and has accepted many of the institutional contradictions of such structures. Dealing with the crisis of the seven colleges exposed the impossibility of running an examination system for lakhs of students through a decade-old administrative logic. Bangladesh has expanded access to higher education without articulating a philosophy for it. Are public universities meant to be elite research institutions? Are they meant to serve as providers of mass access? Credentialing hubs? Are they considered engines of social mobility? It is unclear. Both DU and its foster child, DCU, need to contemplate this question.

While we only begin to address the problem, which includes a dispute over BCS General Education Cadre positions that many teachers and staff fear may jeopardise their posts at DCU, concerns from students regarding degree recognition, and issues related to the rapid construction of infrastructure, we must view the opportunity presented by this crisis as a chance for philosophical reorientation. The alleged treatment of students from seven colleges as second-class citizens holds some truth in it. DU had to sever its ties with these colleges because it did not have the managerial capacity to administer seven colleges, which spread across the city with tens of thousands of students each. The problem was scale, not quality. For DCU to succeed, it must not replicate DU's rigidities under a new banner. The ordinance created for the university suggests that the new university is deemed flexible, distributed, interdisciplinary, and socially engaged.

UGC has proposed a federated, multi-campus, school-based university spread across the existing seven colleges. This model aims to preserve access and inclusivity, reduce immediate infrastructure burdens, and create specialised nodes of excellence through specific schools or clusters. The proposal will allow organic growth towards a central campus at DCU. But the main challenge has a human face. The BCS teachers who have been an integral part of the system must have a fair transition. Earlier, when Jagannath College was turned into a university, similar problems arose. In such case, selective absorption based on transparent criteria might ease the tension. Some BCS teachers have strong academic profiles, favourable teaching evaluations, and years of service. They should be absorbed into DCU's faculty under clearly defined evaluation frameworks guided by the best practices of transition. Then again, there should not be any new recruitment for university teaching under a colonial-style general education cadre system. New recruitment should be discipline-specific and merit-driven. Teachers not absorbed in university roles should be redeployed to other government colleges or retained for the higher-secondary streams within the seven institutions. Similarly, officers and staff must know whether they are migrating into DCU or being redeployed elsewhere.

The concern with DCU is also about retaining old ideas. It would be a waste of time and resources to simply recreate old departmental silos in a new setup. The proposed university must create a breathing space for the just transition of its current students and staff while working towards interdisciplinary clusters needed for the 21st-century world, e.g., climate and society, technology and ethics, digital language and media, and public health and community studies. The university, based in Dhaka, must address urban issues to effectively serve its communities by focusing on urban studies, riverine ecologies, linguistic diversity, community health, and informal economies.

UGC has already proposed a hybrid learning framework, which will take time to be popular. Incentivising the stakeholders (e.g., low-priced or subsidised gadgets or Wi-Fi provided by sponsors or donors) can ease the tension. The university needs to move away from the closed credit systems of its parent institution. The philosophy of the university must involve intellectual openness and social accountability. The ordinances are a beneficial place to bring changes and establish trust among the stakeholders. The Federated School Model, using the seven campuses as distributed schools linked by central governance until infrastructure matures, is a good initiative. The government must sit with the agitating teachers to specify teacher absorption mechanisms, service rules, and redeployment pathways. It must freeze new BCS cadre recruitment for university-level teaching. For future expansion, in the second phase, the university must prioritise interdisciplinarity, community engagement, and Bangladeshi realities. Planning should not consider the existing resources only. Let the crisis of the seven colleges not be a failure, but an invitation to shape the identity of a newborn university.

Dr Shamsad Mortuza is professor of English at Dhaka University.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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