New But Not Wholesome
In a span of only five years sixteen universities came into being in this country where it took almost eighty years to have ten. If the government instituted ten can be cited as models of laggardly development, the private sixteen can be said to have had a mushroom growth. The astounding or impressive appearance - more than three every year - of the private ones somehow rings a dubious note to people used to believing universities to be truly very lofty institutions in perfect tune with other such establishments of the world, all of dizzy intellectual height and encompassing the universe in both its physical connotation and its content of ideas and cultures.
There is indeed hardly a higher point reached by all civilisation than a university. Suddenly we awake to the fact that we have sixteen such new highest points of civilization here in Dhaka and Chittagong and Comilla, housed in rented premises and manned, in some cases, by part-time teachers rushing about making rounds of different campuses.
The University Grants Commission has come to find many serious failings of these universities. It is strange to believe a university enrolling students without fulfilling all the statutory necessities.
This is education business as usual. We believe there are exceptions here too, trying sincerely to rise to the high billing they have forced on themselves. But, to believe UGC and also our horse sense, most have so far been ventures not well-thought-out.
The UGC findings leaves one no option to think otherwise.
The question is why did the government feel so generous with this novel enterprise? A case of infatuation it seems in the explicable absence of any arrangement of monitoring or control with regard to academic standards and financial probity. There is here a very clear case of striking out the approvals of those that haven't yet fulfilled the first minimums. Those that stay after that must answer to demands of academic excellence to be able to cut out a deserved niche. To that end they should be subjected to monitoring and UGC discipline. And, please, no more of these fledglings now. Keep these 16 under strict observation for, say, five years and act according to assessments then made.
Universities and libraries grow and not just burst out each of God's days.
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