Times Higher Education rankings and our universities

A recent ranking of colleges and universities in Asia by Times Higher Education, a reputed journal dealing in academic issues and ideas, gave short shrift to Bangladesh's higher educational institutions. Not a single university in Bangladesh has found a place among the 350 universities listed by the journal for the quality of their research and teaching.

The authorities behind have let it be known that Dhaka University, an institution Bengalis have always considered to be ideal for learning, did not fulfill the criteria necessary for it to be considered in the survey.

That is an embarrassment for the country, when one notes that universities in China, Singapore, India and Pakistan have made it to the rankings. It is embarrassment because for ages many among us have always referred to Dhaka University as the Oxford of the East, which it has never been given the historical standing of Oxford University and indeed the intellectual richness needed for any university to come at par with higher education in the West. That said, our embarrassment over the rankings only deepens when we hear an academic of Dhaka University trying to explain away the shame on a visit to London.

This academic told a Bengali audience, a gathering of Dhaka University alumni based in the UK to be precise, that the authorities did not give any place to DU since the university was not willing to meet their demand for a payment of tens of thousands of dollars in return for a ranking.

That remark was outrageous and even this academic knows it. He was voicing an untruth and indeed accusing the Times Higher Education authorities of soliciting bribes, an idea patently crude and not reflective of the history of the and the reputation it enjoys. As a matter of fact, when the authorities were contacted over this academic's statement, they rejected it and termed it defamatory.

For us worried about the state of higher education in Bangladesh, the issue should serve as a wake-up call. We will be deceiving ourselves if we are inclined to berate for not accommodating any Bangladeshi university in its rankings. An ostrich-like attitude will not do, for there are the facts which stare us in the face where conditions at our universities are concerned.

There is first of all the glaring truth that research is now a process that does not measure up to the standards of a university in terms of global requirements. Universities are expected to be thriving centres of learning and teaching, but when teachers are unable to encourage such intellectual activities and when they themselves appear to be apathetic to research and keeping up with the newest trends and developments in education worldwide, our universities naturally fall behind. Besides, our public universities have in the last two decades turned into centres of political activity on the part of both teachers and students.

A large section of teachers remains glued to political partisanship through association with various panels, a fact which is demonstrated at elections to the teachers' unions. As for students, the activities of student organizations have clearly slipped to being a reflection of the political parties they are linked to rather being an articulation of basic student grievances at the universities.

At a third level, as the eminent educationist and scholar Serajul Islam Choudhury notes, the frequency and facility with which teachers of public universities go over to the private universities to teach in return for appreciable monetary income is a damper on proper scholarship at places like Dhaka University. Finally, one cannot be happy about the manner in which the private universities have been functioning.

Their student intake, in very large instances, has been more of a race for monetary gains than a need to promote scholarly ambitions in the young. Research emerging from the private universities has been minimal, but elitism has certainly been on proper display.

Nations lose touch with history, with the outside world, when education is ignored or not given the pre-eminence it deserves. Our inability to have our universities find places in the rankings of Times Higher Education should make us sit up. Pretending that our universities are doing a fine job would be suicidal.