Decolonising Curricula and Reclaiming Humanities in Bangladesh’s Higher Education

If you walk into any university classroom in Bangladesh, you will find students parsing Western theories of development, governance, or market efficiency. Decades after the official end of British rule, our higher education remains trapped in a coloniality of knowledge that positions Eurocentric frameworks as universal, while relegating our own realities to the margins. Compounding this problem appears to be a market-driven obsession with technocratic and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)-centric education that has systematically starved the arts and humanities. This dual crisis – the lingering colonial structure of our curricula and the continuous devaluation of humanistic inquiry – is failing the real societal needs. 
The systemic rot extends far beyond out-dated syllabi into a deep crisis of ethical degeneration. Intellectual bankruptcy, cash-for-grade scandals, and rampant academic plagiarism are paired with a deep-rooted intellectual servitude. Rather, than producing original thought, our academic systems train researchers to act as mere data-collectors for Global North projects, transforming domestic realities into foreign frameworks. The massive youth-led political shift in the 2024 mass uprising exposed a deep public yearning for social justice, empathy, and institutional integrity. Yet, a growing public disappointment lingers. Even after the political regime has changed, the underlying system of ethical decay remains the same. Our universities continue to function as “compliance factories” rather than reliable centres of civic conscience and public engagement.
Recently, the structural divide between public and private universities has further fragmented the higher education landscape. Public universities, bogged down by bureaucratic inertia and partisan politicisation, frequently resist modern pedagogical updates, rendering their decolonial efforts purely rhetorical. Conversely, private universities operate largely on a corporate, tuition-dependent model. To maximise marketability, private institutions have aggressively stripped away the humanities, rebranding themselves as corporate training grounds. This divergence leaves public university students structurally isolated from global advancements, while private university students are somewhat reduced to hyper-specialised technocrats devoid of civic responsibility. 
The University Grants Commission (UGC) bears significant responsibility for bridging this divide. By indexing institutional quality almost exclusively to market-driven, technocratic benchmarks across both sectors, the UGC has inadvertently incentivised a checklist culture where ethical standards are sacrificed for numerical metrics. To break this cycle, the UGC must reinvent its role – shifting from a passive administrative overseer to an active vanguard of academic integrity, autonomy, and decolonial policy.
To reverse the moral decay, higher education must undergo a radical epistemic rebirth. Now we need to dismantle the “degree-mill” factory line by decolonising the curricula and building a vibrant humanities core across every single undergraduate program in universities. A vibrant humanities core brings subjects like history, philosophy, ethics and literature to every major. Whether a student is majoring in computer science/software engineering, microbiology, business administration or civil engineering, studying the humanities is a social imperative. This will help students think critically about human values, culture, empathy, social justice and ethical practices.
When universities strip away literature, history, ethics and philosophy from technical majors, they reduce education to what Paulo Freire termed the “banking concept” – turning passive students into receiving receptacles for standardised data. A hyper-utilitarian model creates cogs for a corporate machine posing threat to social equity, data privacy, and environmental sustainability. The humanities are the precise tools needed to cultivate social justice, critical consciousness and ethical accountability.
The humanities core needs to be dynamically structured to confront the specific moral crises within professional fields. Technical tracks must integrate tech-ethics and environmental philosophy. A software engineer designing algorithmic systems must understand data privacy and state surveillance – realities painfully underscored during the past state-enforced internet blackouts. A civil engineer designing infrastructure in our delta must take sociology courses to understand how displacement ravages marginalised rural communities. Corporate case studies must be balanced with the political economy of exploitation. Students from Business majors must deal with the ethical failures of crony capitalism by analysing local labour rights, tax evasion, capital flights, and environmental degradation caused by unbridled industrial greed.
Decolonising the curriculum is not about a superficial rejection of global knowledge or deleting Western authors from syllabi. Rather, it demands what the decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience”. It requires us to critically question why a student in Bangladesh learns about public administration or sociology entirely through a Global North lens that assumes a socio-economic reality completely foreign to our own. When our public health, public policy, environmental science, and legal departments ignore the historical, grassroots adaptation strategies of local rural communities, education becomes an extractive exercise. Students are taught to look at their own country through the detached, clinical eyes of a foreign consultant. And the ultimate goal is to maximise profits or test scores, not to build human curiosity or critical inquiry. 
To bridge the gap between academic output and public aspirations, the University Grants Commission (UGC) and university administrations must pivot toward immediate structural reforms. The UGC must codify academic integrity and ethical literacy into the national accreditation framework. First, the commission should mandate this comprehensive humanities core for every single major. Second, we must actively dismantle the language barriers in academia by investing heavily in translating critical global texts into Bangla, while legitimising our native language as a rigorous vehicle for advanced philosophical and scientific knowledge. 
Besides, funding peer-reviewed journals in our native language would be a fundamental act of decolonisation. Finally, we must reform our research methodologies. Over the years, Bangladeshi academics have acted as local informants for Global North researchers. We must introduce participatory research frameworks that view our local communities not as passive subjects to be studied, but as active co-creators of knowledge.
We cannot build a just, equitable, and empathetic society on the scaffolding of an out-dated, colonial, and hyper-utilitarian educational model. It is time to reclaim our classrooms. By isolating technical fields from humanistic inquiry, we have already created a dangerous vacuum where technocrats make decisions devoid of human empathy and historical context. In fact, we must decolonise what we learn by enforcing uncompromising standards of academic integrity.
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The writer is Associate Professor, Department of English at Stamford University Bangladesh. He could be contacted at [email protected]