Marketisation, Epistemic Alienation and Cost of Higher Education

The swift political retreat of State Minister for Primary and Mass Education Bobby Hajjaj after calling Dhaka University a “coaching centre” on a podcast followed the standard protocols of damage control. Confronted with intense backlash from campus alliances, the minister retracted his claims that our historic premier public university lacks original research and does not produce a fraction of research private universities do. Despite the retraction, the controversy reignited a broader critical conversation or discussion about higher education in Bangladesh. However, with the ongoing arguments, the underlying structural question remains exposed: why does the contemporary relationship between university and society feel so deeply fractured, leaving higher education detached from the very populace funding and populating it? To understand this extreme division, we must bypass reactionary outrage and fix the deep systemic crisis facing our universities. A critical understanding reveals that our tertiary education ecosystem – both public and private – is suffering from institutional decay and systemic ideological alienation.

Our universities have lost their foundational purpose, operating as transactional hubs designed merely to process students for corporate or clerical/bureaucratic placement/job markets rather than enriching the community or society at large. In Bangladesh’s public universities, original scholarly curiosity is stifled by deep political patronage networks, archaic administrative systems, and token allocations for research. Faculty recruitment and promotions are frequently tied to institutional box-checking and political conformity rather than transformative intellectual practices and impactful academic contributions to the public sphere.
Conversely, the private university sector – which initially emerged to absorb excess demographic demand – seems to have embraced “marketisation” as its explicit founding ideology. A sharp comparison shows that while top-tier private universities escape the political disruptions and outdated infrastructure of the public sector, they have a different pathology. They function directly as corporate, fee-driven entities. By treating students as customers and education as a premium commodity, many private institutions push the “marketisation and commodification” of higher education to its extreme. This model effectively locks out the vast majority of the public, transforming higher education into an engine that severs the organic link between university and society reinforcing class divisions rather than bridging them.

The most insidious barrier to bridging the gap between university and society is the pervasive matrix of “governmentality” that dictates academic institutions. Derived from Foucault’s work, “governmentality” refers to techniques and rationalities by which institutions govern human conduct, transforming subjects into compliant, self-regulating actors. In our higher education system, this manifests as an invisible but rigid regime of control. Instead of acting as an autonomous space for radical critique and societal imagination, universities have become weaponised by both State and market to maintain the status quo. For faculty, the neoliberal academic governmentality translates into an obsession with administrative metrics, performance indexes, and global institutional rankings that prioritise safe, compliant research over ground-level, organic social engagement or pure academic innovations. For students, this governance model produces a calculated subjectivity. They are trained to see themselves exclusively as “human capital” or “neoliberal entrepreneurs”. Academic success is calculated entirely by one’s compliance with market demands, corporate viability and state-sanctioned political behaviour. This invisible infrastructure of control systematically pre-empts and penalises any intellectual pursuits that question structural inequalities, transforming potentially influential “public thinkers/intellectuals” into “passive cogs” of a bureaucratic machine.

Healing the rift between university and society requires confronting a historical, structural alienation. Public universities remain weighed down by rigid, colonial-era bureaucratic frameworks that fail to address contemporary localised economic, environmental, or social crises. Private universities uncritically mirror the Western business models, corporate frameworks, and an English-only ethos. This Eurocentric higher education model prescribed by the World Bank – primarily executed through large-scale Higher Education Quality Enhancement Project (HEQEP) and the newer Higher Education Acceleration and Transformation Project (HEAT) – is the ultimate structural framework that trains graduates for global corporate compliance while leaving them estranged from grassroots-realities of rural and working-class populace building and feeding the nation. 

When the universities prioritise the Western-centric academic frameworks while completely ignoring the vernacular realities of the Bangladeshi masses, they alienate the university from society perpetuating mental colonisation. A student can graduate with highest honours from either public or private institutions while being utterly unequipped to formulate a local solution for regional public health, climate resilience or micro-governance. The university ultimately remains an elite enclave rather than an organic community hub. But universities must become a porous institution that absorbs the struggles of its surrounding community/society, and outputs tangible actionable solutions.

To transition from “coaching centres” to engines of societal progress, the policymakers and the educators/academics must rethink higher education ecosystem that requires three critical transformations urgently.
1.    Curricula across public and private institutions must be redesigned to place local histories, indigenous developmental models, and vernacular realities at the centre of the learning process.
2.    Public universities must replace political patronage networks with transparent, merit-based hiring and promotion systems for the faculty. And, private universities must prioritise long-term research funding over short-term corporate profit margins.
3.    Research cannot remain trapped behind international paywalls or produced solely for administrative promotion metrics. It must be judged by its direct utility to local communities through action-oriented research, open-access policy designs, and localised public partnerships.
If we really want to foster a genuinely progressive and self-reliant society, we must have ethical courage and political determination to dismantle the structures of dark academia, decolonise our minds and radically transform the dynamics between university and society. Only then the entire system can be reclaimed, and the epistemic sovereignty can be ensured. Finally, our universities will stop acting as an isolated sorting mechanism and become the genuine intellectual heart of the nation.
_____________________________________________
The writer is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Stamford University Bangladesh. He could be contacted at [email protected]