Under the one-party dictatorship in Bangladesh, the 30 odd public universities serve three purposes:
- Credential production centers for younger party cadres so they can be absorbed into the nominally competitive civil and judicial services
- Training ground for the ruling party’s in-house terror squad BCL whereby BCL mid-level leaders can sharpen their skills of murder, rape, intimidation, public goods looting, and mass violence
- Engine for phony scholarship that can be used to beguile Western universities into awarding coveted fellowships and visiting professorships to academics friendly to the one-party dictatorship; few, if any, of these academics ever come back once given the golden ticket to ‘study’ abroad.
The ruling party bigwigs and their financiers in the business world don’t ever send their kids to universities in Bangladesh; every last one of the children of cabinet members, editors of major newspapers (almost all of which are little more than press information units of the ruling junta), and central committee members of the ruling Awami League study in free democracies like the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and Germany.
That leaves the aspiring middle and upper middle classes in a lurch; this demand sector had so far been well catered to by the hundred or so private universities which range from high quality North South and BRAC to sycophantic cult centers like ULAB. The saving grace of these universities has been the absence of an organized presence of the BCL terror squad in the dorms. Not anymore; the ruling dictatorship is afraid that some actual scholarship and education takes place in many of these universities and is eager to put a stop to that. Plus, the BCL terrorists need more places to ply out their trade in murder, mayhem, and loot.
It’s time for the international credential evaluation community (AICE, IACEI, ECE etc) and Western universities to call a spade and spade: transcripts, diplomas, and learning assessments of Bangladeshi universities—public and, now, private—are simply not trustworthy given that the system of examinations and other assessments is run not by university administrators and faculty but by the ruling party’s BCL terror squad cells in each university. It’s time to stop accepting diplomas granted by universities in Bangladesh until such a time that academic freedom and institutional integrity is restored in the higher education sector in that country.