Who Gets to Govern the University?

A recent episode at a public university in Bangladesh offers a useful case for thinking about a problem larger than one campus. On 2 September, the university formally issued an office order assigning teachers to administrative and residential-hall responsibilities. Its own notice board confirms that such an order was issued that day. Independent reports published on 3 September also stated that eight teachers who received responsibilities were members of a 27-member nationalist teachers’ committee announced a day earlier. Separate reports confirmed the formation of that committee on 1 September. These facts justify scrutiny, but they do not prove that the appointments were made because of political affiliation. Timing is not causation, and political membership is not evidence of professional incompetence. The stronger question is whether the appointment process is transparent enough for students, teachers and the public to understand why particular individuals were chosen. When political affiliation and administrative advancement appear close together, opacity creates suspicion even where no wrongdoing has been established. A public institution should not have to ask people to trust its intentions. It should be able to show the basis of its decisions.

Public-administration research helps explain why that distinction matters. Scholars use “politicisation” to describe situations in which political considerations enter appointments or careers that would otherwise be expected to rest mainly on professional criteria. The term should not be stretched beyond the evidence. A politically active academic can also be the most qualified person for an administrative role. But if an institution cannot demonstrate that competence, experience and institutional need were decisive; political affiliation may begin to look like an unofficial credential. Research on bureaucratic recruitment points to the institutional cost of that ambiguity. A peer-reviewed study of central-government officials in five post-communist European countries found merit recruitment associated with lower reported corruption, while politicisation was associated with higher corruption. The setting is different from Bangladesh and the findings cannot be transferred mechanically to universities here. Still, the institutional lesson is useful: professional criteria matter most when they are clear enough to be examined. Transparency does not remove politics from an institution, but it makes political influence easier to detect and professional decisions easier to defend.

The same logic appears in research on procedural legitimacy. A peer-reviewed study in Higher Education, based on two samples of university students in Poland, found that perceptions of fair treatment were strongly related to the perceived legitimacy of university authorities. In the first study, procedural fairness was a stronger predictor of legitimacy than the fairness of outcomes. The country and institutional context are different, so this is not evidence about Bangladesh. But the underlying point travels well: people are more likely to trust authority when they understand the process through which decisions are made. That matters inside a university because administrative power reaches into discipline, residential life, academic management and the distribution of institutional opportunities. If appointments are made through visible criteria, controversy can be answered with evidence. If the criteria are obscure, people are left to infer motive from timing, affiliation and personal networks. The danger is not simply that an unfair decision might be made. It is that even a fair decision may lose credibility because the process cannot be seen.

This is why the issue should not be framed as a dispute about one political party. A principle that changes with the identity of the beneficiaries is not an institutional principle at all. The more useful test is simple: would the same appointment process seem acceptable if the people benefiting from it belonged to a political group we opposed? If the answer changes, the argument is partisan. If it remains the same, it becomes a question of governance. Public universities should therefore move toward procedures that make important administrative appointments easier to assess. Where practicable, positions should have stated qualifications, defined terms and identifiable appointing authorities. Where several candidates could reasonably fill a role, the institution should be capable of explaining why one was selected. Official communication should also distinguish personal political expression from institutional speech. None of this requires suppressing political belief. Universities should remain places where politics can be debated freely and where teachers and students can hold lawful political views. Institutional neutrality means something narrower: political identity should not be allowed to become a privileged route to institutional authority.

The value of the recent case is therefore not that it proves a scandal. It does not. Its value is that it reveals an accountability gap. An official order exists. Independent reports establish that several recipients were also members of a newly announced politically identified teachers’ committee. Those facts are enough to ask for an explanation, but not enough to infer motive. That boundary matters. Strong institutions answer suspicion with process: criteria, records and rules that apply regardless of who is politically ascendant. Bangladesh’s public universities would be better served by that model than by repeated arguments over which political camp has gained influence on which campus. The goal should not be to create universities without political people. It should be to create universities in which political identity matters less because administrative decisions can be justified on grounds that are visible, professional and consistent. Politics will always exist in universities as an object of study, debate and personal conviction. The real danger begins when institutional authority cannot convincingly show that politics is irrelevant to who receives it.
_____________________________________
The writer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at IUBAT and is currently on study leave, residing in Oslo, Norway