Why Bangladeshi Universities Must Decentralise Academic Career Track

Higher education in Bangladesh has operated for over three decades under an archaic institutional delusion. We stubbornly demand that every faculty member be a flawless pedagogue and a prolific researcher. This structural rigidity triggers an unhealthy, counterproductive race where a brilliant classroom storyteller is forced to manufacture quick journal articles for a promotion, while a serious or sincere researcher is bogged down by heavy teaching loads. The result has been an immense system loss in academia. Classrooms suffer from uninspired teaching, research outputs remain derivative, and graduate employability stagnates.  Thus, our universities offer a rigid academic model that alters operational culture, ignores faculty well-being and stifles diverse talents. 

If Bangladesh aims to build a competitive knowledge economy, our universities must urgently redefine their institutional identities.  It is time to rethink the rigid “one-size-fits-all” academic model to prevent the demographic dividend from becoming a burden. To achieve tangible outcomes, the University Grants Commission (UGC) must radically overhaul its centralised, standardised faculty hiring and promotion guidelines. We must decouple teaching from research, allowing academics to specialise or excel in what they do best. This strategy will definitely help educators to foster their expertise and potentially reduce burnout. However, many modern universities are already exploring a balanced “dual-track” approach rather than a complete separation.

The flaws of the current system become glaringly obvious when we look at how uniform promotion criteria impact different disciplines. Currently, the UGC enforces the uniform publication requirements regardless of the field. This “straitjacket” approach has already caused a severe systemic disparity within academia.
Faculty in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) operate in an ecosystem built for rapid, consistent and collaborative publishing. A laboratory experiment can yield multiple short, multi-authored papers in high-impact, Scopus-indexed journals. Consequently, STEM faculty members often race ahead in terms of “citation metrics” and publication counts.

In contrast, disciplines like Literature and Cultural Studies, Politics, History, Mass Communication, and Philosophy rely heavily on single-authored, deeply qualitative papers or comprehensive books. The peer-review and publication cycles for top-tier humanities or social science journals are notoriously long and time-consuming. Besides, global citation indexes rarely capture their localised societal impact. This is very unfortunate!

For faculty in fine arts and architecture, academic excellence is demonstrated through exhibitions, design portfolios, and tangible architectural projects. Forcing an architect or an artist to write traditional journal articles just to cross a promotional threshold is counter-productive and unjust. In business schools, a professor's academic value often lies in writing real-world corporate case studies or building deep corporate networks that usually secure student jobs. Forcing them to chase obscure theoretical citations actively pulls them away from the industry-focused teaching and internships that their students desperately need.
Our higher education crisis stems from this lack of institutional focus. To fix this, we should have a look at the United States' Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. This framework categorises universities based on their primary mission.

One is research-intensive universities that mainly focus on doctoral programmes, external funding, and scientific discoveries or innovations. The other one is teaching-intensive universities focusing primarily on undergraduate education, student development, and graduate employability.

Bangladeshi universities must explicitly declare their mandate based on national needs. A teaching-intensive university should unapologetically focus on student transformation, graduate employability and industry alignment. Conversely, a research-intensive university must be structured to push the boundaries of science and technology to foster pure academic innovations. Forcing every higher education institution to excel in both without determining tracks has been an abortive effort or a half-done project.

In the West, institutions have recognised that teaching is a highly specialised craft, not a secondary chore. Many UK universities utilise the Higher Education Academy (HEA) fellowship framework to benchmark and promote faculty entirely on pedagogical merit.

Conversely, the current UGC policy guidelines require fixed blocks of active service and a mandated number of journal publications to move from lecturer to full professor. This rigid quantitative metric must change. The UGC must introduce a separate framework for teaching-intensive career lines, where promotion metrics could focus on.

Pedagogical Innovation: designing flipped classrooms, problem-based learning modules, and updated, industry-relevant curricula; Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL): a theory (popularised by Ernest Boyer) which argues that studying and improving one’s own teaching methods is a legitimate form of scholarship; Student Outcomes: measured through rigorous peer evaluations, student mentorship success, and graduate employability rates.

Not all teachers who want to excel in a teaching career should be forced to turn into researchers. Elevating classroom excellence to a primary promotion criterion protects faculty from burnout and makes sure that students receive a high-quality education. For faculty members with a genuine aptitude for intensive inquiry, the UGC must authorise a parallel, distinct research track. Faculty on this track must be granted low teaching loads – perhaps one advanced seminar per semester – to give them the uninterrupted cognitive space required for deep scientific breakthroughs. To attract the best minds, the research track could also offer extra incentives, such as performance bonuses, dedicated funding, or lab space. Their promotion must be tied to strict Research Performance Indicators (RPIs) rather than classroom and counselling hours, calibrated fairly to match the realities of each specific discipline/department.

This structural separation is deeply supported by foundational educational theories. Under “Human Capital Theory”, education is an investment that increases economic productivity. Teaching-intensive universities directly feed this by focusing on graduate employability, turning out workforce-ready graduates equipped with problem-solving, critical thinking and technical skills.

From a "structural-functionalist perspective”, a society functions best when its institutions are specialised and efficient. By forcing a natural teacher to do bad research, or a natural researcher to do bad teaching, our current system creates an immense “system loss” that is evident in academia. It wastes human talent, squanders financial resources, and misleads students.

Crucially, implementing these tracks must not create an artificial hierarchy or an institutional divide. A research track faculty member does not need to compete with their counterparts who are interested in a sincere teaching career. There is no inherent competition here; there is only collaboration.

We need a system of mutual collaboration where both teaching and research ecosystems will support one another. We must be fiercely vigilant that this structural shift does not reduce our universities into mere certificate-printing factories or sterile citation-generating conveyor belts. Instead, the ultimate goal should be nurturing brilliant graduates ready to thrive across diverse industries while providing unhindered space for dedicated researchers to pioneer scientific and academic innovations that will make a difference.

Implementing distinct career tracks will create a tripartite victory for the higher education sector. Students receive dedicated instruction from professors who are actively invested in their learning and future careers, or they get to work in cutting-edge labs under undistracted research mentors. University teachers can pursue their authentic passions without constant anxiety of misaligned promotion criteria, significantly reducing academic burnout. Finally, universities will be able to optimise their budgets, eliminate system loss, and naturally rise in regional rankings by maximising their true strengths.
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The writer is an Associate Professor, Department of English, Stamford University Bangladesh. He can be reached at [email protected]