Stop the culture of worshipping university seniors

A while ago, I went to my college's alumnae reception. My friend was telling me that she saw her university senior at the reception but was too scared to say hello – thinking if it was appropriate behaviour according to the seniors-to-juniors interaction guide she had been told to follow.

Recently, a picture of a list of instructions handed out to freshmen by their immediate seniors in Zia Hall of Dhaka University went viral on Facebook. The list contained inane instructions like "One can't sit on the front row in the TV room" or "Students mustn't go to any room without taking permission from their seniors." What is more preposterous than the rules themselves is that every student in the hall has to follow them, otherwise their residency status will be questioned.

Think, after painstakingly going through the admission phase, you secure a place in Dhaka University, and now you're getting kicked out from your hall – the only place you're familiar with in this foreign city, because you touched the TV remote?

Photo: Collected

We only hear about the extreme forms of ragging in the news. But the root of ragging runs deep, it has settled itself prominently in university culture. You won't hear about this type of ragging because it is expressed subtly (like making it mandatory to give salam to your senior when approaching them in the hallway) and accepted silently by the newcomers who just want to survive their university lives and not risk being labelled as a troublemaker.

This makes me wonder, do we understand the line between worship and respect? Coercing freshmen to follow a set of rules to "teach them manners" seems like some seniors want to be treated as Gods and not as their older brothers and sisters.

One may ask, what is the difference between guiding and bullying a junior? Where do we draw the line? What do we call respect and what do we call worship?

If your junior respects you, they won't hesitate to let you know when their opinion differs from yours. While doing so, they won't be rude to you but will point out the differences. However, when you bully your junior to say yes to your every action, they won't point out when you're wrong, and it's not because they think you are always right but because they are crippled with fear that if they say something, you will do something awful to them.

Now, from a senior's angle, this situation doesn't seem too problematic. Who doesn't want to feel like a king? Psychology says that one of the fundamental human desires is to feel important. Every person wants to feel like they matter, and from that basic need, derives the craving to exercise authority over someone.

It's not a crime to want to be powerful. However, it's a crime when authorities fail to set regulations to define how powerful one can be. When authorities turn a blind eye to the culture of reckless dominion exerted by individuals, everything goes chaotic, and people perceive the notion that they're above it all.

This is how the culture of ragging grows day by day – students get bullied and they bully someone later on – because it has been established as the norm. With the help of political backup, some students think they're invincible.

University is meant to be a place where students cooperate, collaborate, and find their own voices. If we look at our history, we'll see that every spark of revolution started with university students, because back then they weren't tagged as manner-less if they spoke freely. We have forgotten that speaking frankly is not the same as being uncivil.

Today, a rotten system backed up by dirty politics has created an atmosphere in our universities where we've accepted mistreating juniors as the standard. We've implemented every step to throttle the voices of new blooms on campus. We've closed the doors of healthy interaction and forged an environment of fear, oppression, and suffocation.

It is high time senior students realise that by bossing the juniors around, they aren't doing themselves any favours. Sure, they can bask in the glory of feeling important. But in the long run, how sustainable is it? By contributing to forming a stifling environment, isn't the groundwork being laid for a country where university students never learn to think or act for themselves? What good does that do to society?

Forget all that, why can't we be decent human beings and treat someone nicely? Why are we so insecure about our worth that we have to order juniors to salute us as we go left and right? Why are we so obsessed with feeling superior? Students who are part of this culture of senior worship need to ask themselves these questions – and look in the mirror to understand why they really do what they do.

Sabiba doesn't believe that seniors should be worshipped. Send good arguments at fb.com/Sabibastro