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Enhancing policies and priorities in private university management
Dr. Forqan Uddin Ahmed writes for DOT :
In public universities there is the notion of decadent politics, terrorism, censure of the session, the failure of narrowing the expectations of growing higher education and the trend of going to study abroad that links the adverse impact of the country’s foreign currency. The concepts of private university in Bangladesh have made many successes in a short span of time to meet the demands of higher education. However, there are also some failures which are very normal. The time has come to go ahead with the unlimited possibilities of meeting the needs of higher education at the private level. The highest Constitutional statutory body of university education management in Bangladesh, the ‘University Grants Commission identifies the priority sector in the management of private universities and the need to revise the steps taken in this regard have been demanded. The changed conditions of the 21st century make matters worse. The first among the steps taken by the Grant Commission was the temporary approval of private universities. Temporary sanctioned universities are also given a short timeframe to ensure that they have to build permanent campus within the next five years. For this, one acre in Dhaka, two acres in Chittagong and other areas of the country will have to build permanent campus in five acres. They have identified universities in green, yellow and red on the basis of success-failure to achieve this goal. Grant Commission has threatened to stop enrollment of students only in five years, and not to be identified in green, yellow and red color, but to achieve this goal within five years of permanent campus. Most of the universities could not fulfill this requirement for very reasonable reason. Because only five years in the construction of a university’s permanent infrastructure is very rare. The world’s famous universities have taken hundreds of years to come to the present stage. Private universities in Bangladesh are like a child in their lifecycle. It is a big mistake to think of adults and impose adult responsibility on their necks. There is no meaning for binding a short span of just 5 years for building a permanent campus. In absolute terms there has been an impressive quantitative expansion in the general university education even though the rate of increase in science and technology sector is not significant. There is no objection to such increase in line with population increase and increase in primary and secondary level output. But the crux of the problem is that such increase always does not correspond to the needs, required infrastructure, faculty and financial facilities.
Library and laboratory conditions are not conducive for quality education. There is no denying the fact that the use of library facilities by students and teachers have declined over the years. The teachers in most cases seem to rely on particular texts and the students seems to possess increasingly poorer language ability to comprehend and explore the vast expanse of scholarship that the libraries hold. The libraries are poor as they lack adequate resources to buy recent publications and order for the basic journals. Likewise, the laboratories suffer from inadequacy of equipment. Import dependence for such items has made the problems much more complex.
Most of the faculty members at private universities either possess grade or post-grade degrees from renowned universities overseas or are visiting faculty members from public universities, though that may not be the case all the time. For instance, many professors from DU, IBA and BUET regularly conduct classes at the various departments in private universities in Dhaka. In such cases, students of private universities are essentially learning the same material from the same teachers as public university students, or from otherwise qualified teachers who are experts in their fields. It proves the well production of skillful teachers from our public universities who are capable of changing the atmosphere of public universities as well.
If our country thinks that as a nation, education will be the main topic in all the agenda, if they believe that education is the backbone of the nation, if they think that school-college-madrasa-university has any role to develop for the whole nation, the future power of the country must be educated and skillful. It is time to take up the above mentioned issues.
The Writer is a researchers & columnist.