NEWSPAPER reports said on Tuesday that at least seven newly established public universities located far away from the capital are operating with barely any senior professor. Three of those varsities have only a single professor and one is running without any professor. They are facing difficulty to become fully functional and their students are facing the misfortune to suffer from lack of quality education. The biggest problem is lack of initiative to create more teachers and build them as per new demand; one can’t buy varsity teachers from market. Here the University Grants Commission (UGC) has a role but it ignored.
Universities must ensure quality teaching and high quality teachers count on top of everything for any university to be recognized as the best place of learning and attract meritorious students. Moreover facilities for academic research and other avenues of achieving excellence are some other yardsticks for a university to be worthy of name at home and abroad. Now question arises if so many public universities are at work, set up at huge cost and running without a single full professor in many, how students can be admitted to those varsities and parents can spend money for their children.
It is really sad that in some of those universities’ Lecturers and Assistant Professors are working as Departmental Heads as senior teachers from other varsities are not interested to take jobs in remote locations. Local candidates have been recruited as varsity teachers in many of them without minimum qualification; mainly on political consideration. But by doing this the performance quality of these varsities has become open to question and future of the students are equally at risk.
Most of these varsities have not enough infrastructures like teachers’ staff quarters, students residential halls, sports facilities and academic and administrative buildings. Laboratories for Science and Engineering Faculty-based departments are yet to be developed. In fact political pressure worked behind opening those universities and their staff were also recruited accordingly. But veteran educationists find no interest in going to these universities because of poor academic activities and lack of health services and education facilities for their children. Besides, senior teachers can earn a lot by doing consultancy and teaching part-time at private universities mainly located in the capital and large cities like Chittagong and Rajshahi.
There is no wonder that many universities in the capital and some big cities are having excess teachers but since these are not transferable jobs, they are not interested to go to the newly set up ones. The basic problem is lack of policy coherence and any solution to this problem may not be in sight soon.
