A slice of the university pie
Recently, a special adviser to the prime minister criticised the country's universities for awarding "useless degrees" that contribute to the high unemployment rate. He mentioned that one would hardly find an engineer or a business graduate without a job. This may be true for graduates from some top universities, but as the adviser puts it, even a large number of graduates from lesser or private universities, albeit with engineering or business degrees, do not immediately get jobs. Then again, in a recent batch of foreign service cadres, 70 percent of the new recruits have come from engineering. While this adds to the prestige of their studied discipline, it also highlights the lack of coordination that we have between educational priorities and job sectors. The idea that these engineers have spent years studying and training in a professional discipline, only to choose public administration as their career, suggests a significant waste of time and an incorrect investment based on a limited understanding of university education.
The honourable adviser then blasted "useless" disciplines such as sociology or English for flooding the list of unemployables. So it is the jobseekers' fault that they could not make it to the top engineering or business schools, and by implication, this has become an embarrassment for the government. According to his utilitarian view, not everyone should go to the tertiary system; instead, some should opt for vocational training. What is amiss in this argument is the idea that the university acts as a foundational platform for young boys and girls to become adults. They learn to aspire and dream big. Even a graduate from the English department can become a finance minister, and a graduate from the sociology department can become a successful administrator for engineers. University, etymologically, means "the whole world." It is the shortened version of universitas magistrorum et scholarium, meaning "community of masters and scholars." By looking at a slice of the university under a utilitarian microscope, the adviser is suggesting a type of exclusivity that defeats the purpose of a university.
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Another group of professionals has made headlines for slicing the university pie. Divisional and deputy commissioners presented a proposal to the prime minister during the DC Conference on March 3-6, asking for a professional university for themselves and a specialised university for their children. The public servants did not shy away from boasting their elitism, envisioning an academic farmhouse where some animals are more equal than others.
In response, Public Administration Minister Farhad Hossain recently stated that the government had no intention to establish any separate university for the children of bureaucrats at this moment. Hossain, a graduate of Dhaka University's Department of English, said, "The university is universal; it comes from a universal idea… A university is an open space where knowledge is freely acquired, and people can think without constraints. It is where minds develop, shaping individuals into capable citizens. It is a hub for all kinds of people, a place where genius thrives."
I would like to thank the minister for deftly reminding us, including the entrepreneurial adviser and the civil servants, about the big picture of a university. We can loosely translate an old Bangla adage as, "Pursue knowledge today, and tomorrow you will ride cars and carriages [of success]." This is not always the case in the digital era. Even Tiktokers without education can ride fancy cars. Acquiring some key skills can lead to earning opportunities. Many of the billionaires today are school dropouts. Their success adds to the growing anti-academic sentiment. Then again, only a handful of business start-ups make the final cuts. To go further in life, one needs a thorough understanding of the school of life, bishwabidyalaya.
The utilitarian value of a university must reflect the institution's inherent value. For knowledge to be created and nurtured, university provides a participatory academic ecosystem that thrives in democratic practices. Universities, by design, are the bastions of creativity and freedom of expression. The formulaic business models or disciplined bureaucracy do not necessarily chime with such a view of university, and its inherent strength.
Learning to earn is just one facet of an educational institution. True, universities do teach us to become engineers, doctors, or corporate bosses, but there is an ambitious objective of higher education. Our celebrity guests often parrot such a noble objective of education in convocation speeches and motivational talks. Universities teach us how to live, how to discern who we are, and what directions our societies should pursue to give our lives a fulfilling meaning. I feel that both the adviser and the civil servants lack clarity about the very purpose of a university. The bureaucrats may have gotten carried away seeing their military cousins, who have established their own universities.
Here, a review of the university concept is pertinent. Since the inception of institutions like Nalanda Mahavihara in India (427) and the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Morocco (859), the university has been a social space for intellectual exchanges. These institutions incorporated progressive models of teaching and learning within their religious frameworks, offering curricula that included logic, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and many other subjects. The University of Bologna (1088) and the University of Oxford (1096) replicated the successful model of teaching for Europeans. The university system's main growth happened in the 19th century, in a post-Darwinian scenario when belief in religion received a sharp blow. The university became a proxy space to find meaning, consolation, wisdom, and a sense of community, which were once the forte of organised religion. Culture, not necessarily scripture, explored issues of morality and spirituality. The secularising idea remains responsible for the construction of not only universities but also museums, libraries, and concert halls.
As an autonomous community of students and scholars, modern universities now come in different shapes and sizes. Colonial influences primarily model modern universities after those in Europe. There are also universities with vocational and technical focuses that are closely linked to the local economy. Our agricultural university is a case in point. To be a university, they must conform to academic standards to be able to call what they provide "higher education." They boost a nation's economic growth rate and transform students' lives. But, as John Henry Newman observed in his book The Idea of a University, knowledge produced in a university is also worthwhile in its own right.
The utilitarian value of a university must reflect the institution's inherent value. For knowledge to be created and nurtured, university provides a participatory academic ecosystem that thrives in democratic practices. Universities, by design, are the bastions of creativity and freedom of expression. The formulaic business models or disciplined bureaucracy do not necessarily chime with such a view of university, and its inherent strength.
The global outcry against the atrocities in Gaza is testament to the power of universities. It started with the liberal arts school in the US, going against the hegemonic construction of a Zionist belief of a racial supremacy of Israelites. It is the university students who have come forward to show us hope in a world that is blinded by greed and utilitarian ambitions. Slicing the university pie would not have given us the norms to sift right from wrong, as we are seeing now.
Dr Shamsad Mortuza is a professor of English at Dhaka University.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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