NELSON Mandela described ‘education as the most powerful weapon to change the world.’ John Dewey said, ‘Education is not just preparation for life; education is life itself.’ Bangladeshis are watching ‘the most powerful weapon to change the world’ or the nation’s ‘life itself’ being destroyed in real time by a small minority of their fellow citizens and are blissfully silent about it.
The recent incidents at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology are significant and symbolic for many reasons. BUET is the rare institution of higher learning in the country that can rub shoulders with credible institutions of higher learning abroad. I was told by sources in the Japanese foreign ministry during my tenure there as ambassador in 2002–2006 that BUET students were the only Bangladeshi students who were given Japanese visas simply for being graduates of BUET. That was two decades ago. During this period, public universities have come up like mushrooms in Bangladesh that have been universities in name only. BUET kept its credibility amidst the declining trend of quality and output in the other public universities.
It does not need a crystal ball to explain why public universities of Bangladesh have failed to become the ‘most powerful’ weapon of change and have become its most powerful obstacle instead. The reason is palpably obvious. It is, to borrow a phrase from US politics for an explanation, ‘Students politics (of the ruling party), stupid!’ It would be appropriate to add ‘teachers’ politics, stupid’ as a supplementary reason.
Many Bangladeshis, for some inexplicable reasons, are still nostalgic about the role of the students at Dhaka University in the 1952 Language Movement, the 1962 Education Movement and the 1969 Students Movement that brought down field marshal Ayub Khan’’s decade-long military regime. These movements paved the way for the liberation of Bangladesh. The students of that era demonstrated the vision and the courage that the politicians lacked. They showed the politicians the way to achieve their political goals and objectives.
These movements are now history. There are no such movements on even the distant horizon. Unfortunately, the ideals, principles and courage that students in politics and their leaders showed in these movements are also history. They have been replaced with nexuses of evil on public university campuses. The first nexus is between the ruling party and its student party, the Bangladesh Chhatra League. The second is between the ruling party and the teachers’ group that supports it.
Unofficially, student politics is now restricted to the Bangladesh Chhatra League only. Those who support the opposition parties have been marginalised. They live on the campuses in fear for their lives. Student politics today is the antithesis to student politics in the Pakistan era. A lot is still remembered about the role of the pro-government National Students Federation at Dhaka University in the 1960s. The activities of the NSF were saintly compared with the activities of the Chhatra League at the public university these days.
The Chhatra League leaders are the princelings on public university campuses. They are the law unto themselves. They move around at these universities like they inherited these institutions from their parents. The public universities receive huge sums of taxpayers’ money for development. Under an informal system called ‘tender politics’, a good part of the money ends up in the pockets of the Chhatra League leaders that back the contractors that get the development contracts. This is an open secret in public universities.
The activities of students of the Chhatra League are not confined just to public university campuses. They assist the police in attacking opposition movements in the streets. They carry arms during these attacks that people see due to the technologies that are available to capture them on video in real time. The Chhatra League is not bothered about such public exposure. They feel proud instead, because the regime indulges them which brings them power and benefits.
The students who dare oppose the Chhatra League for their right in student politics are given made-to-order tags of fundamentalists, terrorists, anti-liberation and anti-Indian elements by the Chhatra League. The pro-regime administrations backed by the regime’s law enforcement agencies buy these tags and make the lives of those that dare identify themselves as activists of the opposition parties unbearable on public university campuses. The Chhatra League even murders them at will as they have done at BUET where the murder of Abrar Fahad in 2019 touched the heart of everyone except supporters of the ruling party.
The teachers at universities worldwide are the moral guardians of the students they teach like they are their own children. The teachers at public universities in Bangladesh are exceptions. Politics, and that too of the Bangladesh variety, is their priority. The Bangladesh (Adaption of University Laws) Ordinance 1972 was enacted out of the experience of the Pakistan era when teachers did not have their parties on university campuses as they did not consider it normal and were forbidden from playing any active role in politics, individually.
Public university teachers of Bangladesh used the ordinance to politicise these institutions and turn them into ruling party institutions. Bangabandhu had instructed to keep BUET and the Agricultural University out of the purview of the ordinance while approving the draft of the ordinance for the university of Dhaka, Chittagong, Rajshahi and Jahangirnagar. He was apprehensive that the teachers would use the ordinance for their political goals and personal gains and not for the lofty objectives of higher education that the ordinance wanted to facilitate and destroy these two universities he wanted to be protected.
Bangabandhu’s concern was prophetic. The ruling party teachers at public universities and the ruling party used the ordinance for their political and personal goals. They developed a spoils system to sustain the nexus of the ruling party and the teachers who support it at public universities. Under it, the ruling party distributes the powerful posts of the vice-chancellors to its supporters only. The vice-chancellors then use their influence to appoint the numerous administrative posts at the public universities that yield power and benefits to the teachers of the ruling party.
The spoils system marginalised the teachers who opposed the ruling party. It replaced the merit system in their recruitment and promotions at public universities that is sacrosanct worldwide with sycophancy for the ruling party. This nexus and the spoils system have kept the public universities under the control of the ruling party as a major tool for its national political objectives.
The nexuses, first, between the ruling party and the students and, second, between the ruling party and the teachers at the public universities have pushed these institutions towards the proverbial black hole. All kinds of crimes that take place outside public universities take place within its four walls these days. Each public university has its own tale of horrors to tell. Jahangirnagar, Jagannath and Chittagong University are now holding the centre stage in the tales of horrors at the public universities of Bangladesh.
Parents do not sleep in peace in Bangladesh who send their sons or daughters to public universities. They fear for their lives if they are sons. They fear for their honour if they are daughters. If Bangladesh wants to save the public universities, it must destroy the two nexuses that are killing them, the one between the ruling party and the students and the other between the ruling party and the teachers. The parents of the country are on their knees pleading to the regime and praying to the Almighty for reprieve.
Postscript: A Dhaka University social sciences professor said that he would never leave his DU job because it is the best in the world for doing nothing. His statement went viral on the internet. It exposed the weakness of the curriculum and method of teaching social sciences and arts subjects at the public universities that pose no challenges to the teachers and little to the students who both have the easiest times of their lives at public universities of Bangladesh, in the academic sense.
The article appeared in the New Age