A university should be a place where ideas are tested, knowledge is created, and young people are prepared to shape the future of a nation. It should not be a space where fear, factional rivalry, and partisan control crowd out learning. Yet that is the uncomfortable reality many public universities in Bangladesh continue to face.
This matters because the condition of a nation’s universities often shapes the condition of its future. Countries that lead in innovation do not do so by accident. They build institutions where students and teachers can focus on study, research, and discovery without constant disruption. Their campuses are designed to nurture curiosity, discipline, and excellence.
Look across East Asia. Universities in China, Japan, and South Korea are widely associated with intense academic commitment and a culture of hard work. Across Europe, universities in Germany, Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, and France continue to invest in research and innovation. In the United States, young people in their twenties are launching startups, working on robotics, contributing to medical science, advancing artificial intelligence, and entering highly competitive doctoral programs.
These countries differ in politics, history, and society. But they share one important principle: they treat universities as engines of national development, not as arenas for partisan occupation.
Bangladesh, too, has no shortage of talent. Our students are capable, ambitious, and full of promise. What too many of them lack is an academic environment that allows that promise to mature. At an age when students elsewhere are building research profiles, preparing for higher studies, or experimenting with entrepreneurial ideas, many of our students are forced to navigate a campus culture shaped by political loyalties, intimidation, and confrontation.
The damage is both immediate and lasting. Time that should be spent in classrooms, libraries, and laboratories is consumed by tension and uncertainty. Academic schedules are interrupted. Serious scholarship loses momentum. Research culture weakens before it has the chance to grow. In too many cases, merit is overshadowed by affiliation, and independent thought is made to feel risky.
This is not simply a university problem. It is a national development problem.
No country can hope to compete in science, technology, health care, or industry while allowing its universities to remain trapped in cycles of fear and factionalism. We cannot speak of becoming a knowledge-based economy while neglecting the institutions that are supposed to produce knowledge. We cannot celebrate the potential of our youth while denying them the freedom and stability they need to realize it.
Universities in China, Japan, and South Korea are widely associated with intense academic commitment and a culture of hard work. Across Europe, universities in Germany, Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, and France continue to invest in research and innovation. In the United States, young people in their twenties are launching startups, working on robotics, contributing to medical science, advancing artificial intelligence.
A university does not belong to any political party. It belongs to every student who enters it with hope, every teacher who serves it with integrity, and every citizen who depends on it to produce ideas, leadership, and innovation. Its dormitories should not be spaces of intimidation. Its classrooms should not be overshadowed by partisan muscle. Its administration should not tolerate practices that reward obedience over excellence.
This does not mean universities should be silent or apolitical in the broader intellectual sense. On the contrary, universities must remain places of debate, disagreement, and critical inquiry. Students should question power, engage with public issues, and develop political awareness. Teachers should encourage open discussion and independent thinking. But there is a clear difference between a campus alive with ideas and a campus captured by partisan domination. Intellectual disagreement strengthens a university; organized coercion weakens it.
The task before us is therefore clear. We must restore universities to their proper role as spaces of freedom, scholarship, and discovery. That means protecting students from intimidation, reducing partisan interference in campus life, strengthening academic governance, and investing seriously in research infrastructure. It also means valuing teachers and researchers for their work rather than their alignments. Most importantly, it means accepting a simple truth: a country that wants innovation must first create institutions where free minds can flourish.
Bangladesh’s young people deserve better than the status quo. They deserve campuses where they can think boldly, study seriously, and dream without fear. They deserve universities that encourage invention instead of obedience, inquiry instead of intimidation, and excellence instead of factional loyalty. The country, in turn, deserves institutions that produce researchers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and leaders�"not graduates exhausted by conflict before they have even had the chance to begin.
There is still time to choose a different path. But that choice requires honesty. We must admit that the politicization of campus life has come at a heavy cost. We must recognize that every talented student pushed away from scholarship is a national loss. And we must understand that every year wasted in campus conflict is a year stolen from Bangladesh’s future.
If we continue to let politics consume our universities, we will keep losing time, talent, and possibility. But if we free them to do what universities are meant to do, we may yet build the future we so often speak of.
The writer is former Vice Chancellor, CUET, RUET and USTC
