VCs: Academic Leaders or Partisan Shield-bearers?

The lecture halls of Bangladesh’s public universities are quiet, but the administrative corridors are deafeningly loud. Across the country, a familiar and exhausting stalemate has gripped our premier seats of learning, most visibly punctuated by the chaotic scenes at Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology (CUET). There the newly appointed Vice Chancellor, Professor Sheikh Shariful Alam, entered his office by breaking padlocks alongside political student wing leaders, only to be promptly locked inside by an outraged student body. Such incidents reflect a troubling pattern in which weeks and months pass with institutions left rudderless, embroiled in gridlock over the appointment of Vice Chancellors (VC). This has become a phenomenon in public universities. More concerningly, when appointments are finally made, they are rarely greeted with academic celebration. Instead, they are met with fierce resistance, gheraos and ultimatum from a highly vigilant student body.

Yes, we were promised a departure from this toxic cycle in the post-uprising education landscape. Yet, two and a half years into this transitional era, an uncomfortable truth has emerged: there is no qualitative difference between how VCs were appointed under the previous autocratic regime and how they are being chosen today. The faces in the portraits have changed, but the machinery of partisan selection remains completely intact.

This brings us to a fundamental question that cuts to the very core of our higher education system: Are VCs and academic leaders tasked with nurturing the nation’s finest minds, or are they merely glorified spokespersons for whichever political entity holds the keys to the state machinery?

The crisis stems from an open secret that has crippled our public universities for decades: the absolute politicisation of VC offices. Under normal circumstances, leading a university requires a delicate balance of academic vision and administrative acumen. In Bangladesh, however, a VC must possess a third, far more critical skill: absolute political allegiance or subservience. When appointments are explicitly handled as rewards for ruling-party-aligned teachers’ panels, objectivity is the first casualty.

Consequently, public university VCs appointed under this framework operate in a state of permanent cognitive dissonance. They feel politically confident but ethically shaky. They step into their offices backed by the formidable power of the state, yet they are fully aware that the academic community, their peers and the student body view them with deep scepticism. Most of them lack the moral authority to govern. To compensate for this deficit of organic legitimacy, these administrators often transform into shield-bearers for the ruling regime. They spend their tenures managing optics, accommodating the aggressive demands of the ruling party’s student wing and echoing state slogans, rather than making teaching impactful, elevating research outputs or modernising outdated curricula. When a crisis hits the campus, their first instinct is not to protect the students but to protect the government that appointed them.

This administrative rot is not entirely confined to the public sector. While private universities like to market themselves as corporate and politically insulated sanctuaries of higher education, they are trapped in a differently flawed system. The rot here is systemic, legally codified and equally politicised, fundamentally driven by the structural contradictions embedded within the Private University (PU) Act 2010.

Under the act, VCs are officially appointed by the government in the order of the chancellor of the university, who happens to be the head of state. This immediately injects political calculations into the private domain. However, the legal framework creates a deeply compromised governance structure: while the Chancellor appoints the VC, the PU Act 2010 dictates that the VC is operationally accountable to the university’s Board of Trustees (BoT), not to the Chancellor.

Even worse, the law empowers the BoT to effectively hold the VC hostage. A VC can be summarily removed if the BoT complains about their actions and submits a formal letter to the Chancellor. This legislative design strips the VC of any real authority and administrative autonomy. They are left politically vulnerable from above and operationally shackled from within. How can a private university VC play an active and independent role when their survival depends on pleasing the apparently commercial investors who hold the legal leverage to oust them at a moment’s notice?

This explains the suffocating grey areas that plague the private sector. Take, for instance, the recent crisis at East West University, where the vice chancellor suddenly went on a mysterious three-month leave due to “unforeseen reasons”. When a private university VC tries to assert academic independence, maintain financial transparency or uphold educational standards against the commercial dictates of overbearing trustees, they are swiftly sidelined, forced out or sent on sudden leaves. The pressure is less loud than a public campus protest, but it is just as stifling.

The ultimate casualty of this systemic failure across both sectors is the student body and the faculty. When we observe that public university VCs answer to political masters and private university VCs bow to boards of trustees, both students’ voices and academics’ logical demands are left completely unheard. However, the post-uprising generation of students seems to be different from its predecessors. Having witnessed the historic collapse of a seemingly invincible regime, today’s students have a near-zero tolerance for bureaucratic hypocrisy.

Where is higher education heading? If the current trajectory is a serious indication, we are moving towards a future where our universities cease to be centres of excellence and instead become battlegrounds of administrative containment. By refusing to decouple university governance from party politics and commercial interests, the current administration is repeating the exact mistakes of the past.

We cannot build the nation on the foundations of old and decayed practices. If we truly wish to rescue our universities from this perpetual stalemate, the method of appointing VCs must be radically overhauled through explicit structural and legislative remedies. Firstly, we need an independent and non-partisan search committee composed of eminent scholars, international educationists and civil society representatives to choose public university VCs based on teaching excellence record, impactful research credentials and administrative merit. Secondly, the PU Act 2010 law must be rewritten to grant private university VCs true administrative autonomy. Legislative amendments should protect VCs from arbitrary removal by the BoT, establishing clear, independent judicial or regulatory oversight to settle disputes between administrators and trustees. Besides, academics’ voices must be heard, and academic freedom with accountability should be protected by the law.

Until we break the umbilical cord connecting the vice chancellor's office to the rooms of political and corporate power, the intellectual backbone of the nation will continue to erode. It is time for the authorities and policymakers to realise that a university VC should answer to the students and the faculty, not to the party in power or the board of trustees. If this post-uprising transition fails to reclaim the integrity of our highest offices of learning, we will not have birthed a new dawn for higher education. We hope the government will realise the gravity of problems facing higher education institutions.
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The writer is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Stamford University Bangladesh. He could be contacted at [email protected]