Ground Realities
Where are all the scholar-teachers gone?
MADRASA students aspiring to admission at Dhaka University have thrown down the gauntlet. They have demanded that the university relax its stringent admission rules in order for them to be accommodated in some significant departments of the university. And they have made sure that their demand is not trifled with. In the presence of the vice- chancellor of the university, they have vandalised his office and so have hinted at the kind of future they mean to shape for education in this country.
That demonstration of patently bad behaviour ought to have been handled firmly by the authorities. But that was not to be. And what we now have before us is a condition where a group of teachers of the university argue that the demand of the madrasa students must be taken into account, that if it is not they will have nothing to do with the admission process at Dhaka University this year.
And so, what you have here is a university about to be taken hostage not only by a handful of unruly young men but also by teachers whose responsibility should have been to promote excellence at the university.
Forget the fact that Dhaka University was once known as the Oxford of the East (Oxford is a wholly different ballgame altogether). Cast aside as well the plainly rude behaviour of the madrasa students who went on the rampage at the vice-chancellor's office. They are callow, they are unacquainted with the world of sophisticated behaviour and they are prey to all the limitations that come with misguided youth.
But how do you explain the attitude of the teachers we now know as the white panel of academics at Dhaka University? Among these teachers are some who happen to have instructed us in the classroom in our younger days. From these teachers we drew the lesson that intellectual progress was the goal of higher education, that from the university we go out into the wider world and take the future of that world in hand.
These teachers drilled the thought in us that the torch would be passed one day from their hands into ours. Those were moments when we spotted the future through the enlightenment of these teachers.
And now these very teachers, having earlier agreed that high standards of education must be maintained in the matter of admission to honours classes at the university, are informing the country unabashedly that they have happily gone back on their principle, that they will make things difficult for the university if the rules of admission are not relaxed.
Observe the peculiarity of it all: a section of teachers, guided more by their political partisanship and less by their commitment to academic excellence, have now seen little that is wrong with threatening the very institution they happen to serve. With teachers of this hue, of this brand, what future do you expect for the country?
And that brings you to bigger worries, those that have arisen in the past and look set to cast increasingly dark shadows on our lives. Time was when teachers at Dhaka University were the repositories of universal respect. That was because intellect was all, because parochial politics was far from our thoughts.
We will not speak of the distant past, for that was a rich phenomenon in our collective experience. But if you consider the early 1970s, when Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury took charge as vice-chancellor of Dhaka University, the dignity of our universities was a defining point in the future we planned to build for ourselves.
Forget the times of Abdul Monem Khan, when life under the Ayub Khan dictatorship was a call to philistinism, with vice-chancellors and ministers all competing to promote a culture of sycophancy in what was then a provincial ambience. But Justice Chowdhury made a difference. And there have been others -- Abdul Matin Chowdhury, Abdul Halim Chowdhury, Shamsul Haque (both of them) -- who made it their business not to let their concern for students' welfare decline into an experiment of fraternising with the young.
Vice-chancellors in the old days did not seek the support and sympathy of activists of students' organisations in their moments of crisis. Neither did students call up the audacity in themselves to proffer advice or hurl threats at vice-chancellors or teachers. It was a simple matter of the university being in the truest sense a testing ground for the mind, a canvas that prepared the young for dealing with the universe.
That does not appear to be the reality any more. And that again is natural, considering that teachers have boxed themselves into the various panels that come in the various colours. Blue, white or pink -- nothing wrong with that, except that these colours have come to symbolise divisive national politics at just the place where politics ought not to be, or to have been.
You do not expect scholars to be at par with politics, to come level with political parties. You expect them to be above that, on the peaks where ideas of liberalism are shaped and worldviews are forged.
But when you stumble into the knowledge that some teachers may be inclined to indulging in sexual harassment, that a bigger number of them are desperate to uphold their political loyalties rather than their professional responsibilities, you know that something of the old sense of idealism has vanished through the encroachments made into academia by the plainly mediocre and the patently motivated.
And that is where the sadness lies. You think of the National University and all the manifest wrong it was subjected to under a vice-chancellor in the recent past. You recall the case of the fifty-two first classes in a department of Dhaka University, the fact that those involved have escaped punishment and indeed go around offering sermons to the country, and you wonder if higher education can sink any deeper. And there is more.
With all those private universities making their presence felt all across the country, teachers at the public universities have often been drawn to the advantages to be had through being part of their faculty. You can ask these teachers if they really must desert the public universities that are their home and seek better, greener pastures elsewhere. And they will then speak to you of other issues, of money that they, like everyone else, need. Is that all? The answer depends on how you would like to shape it.
Ah, but we will not go into the polemical. The university is never, should never be, about the polemical. It is always about principles and honour and sacrifice and the attainment of excellence. Gobindo Chandra Dev and Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta and Munier Chowdhury and Rashidul Hasan, with so many others, died for a higher cause than a lowering of standards in education. Closer to home and to our times, teachers of Dhaka University and Rajshahi University went through the humiliation of detention and remand without losing their sense of self-esteem. They symbolise our sense of pride.
It is that legacy we are proud of. And it does not please us one bit that some teachers at Dhaka University are today cheerfully in a state of genuflection before a band of unruly young men intent on bringing higher learning down to their motivated level.
Can we once again, someday, have the privilege of being in the company of scholar-teachers please?
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