Reform conversations about universities in Bangladesh tend to break down at the same point. Someone identifies a real problem. Someone else says fixing it requires more money, new legislation, or both. Then the conversation stops, because matters of money and legislation move slowly. But then, even fixes which do not require either are also delayed.
The solution is to redirect, restructure, and resource: three categories classified by cost and effort that allow universities, ministries, and donors to agree more quickly on which reforms can begin immediately and which require deliberation. Reforms under redirection need neither new money nor new approval; those under restructuring need effort and reorganisation, but no new funding; and those requiring resources need both money and policy support, and are therefore the slowest to be delivered.
The “redirect” bucket covers reforms that cost nothing extra because they simply change how existing money or time is used. We have argued previously that the research budget of Dhaka University, spread equally among more than 2,000 teachers, could instead fund 10 structured overseas PhD partnerships under a brain circulation model, where scholars remain connected to a home department throughout their degree programme. The same principle applies to teaching loads that take little account of research output, equipment, and journal subscriptions bought separately by departments that could pool them, or overheads recovered from external grants that disappear into general accounts instead of helping to seed new projects. As opposed to a ministerial approval, such redirection would only need a head of institution willing to redraw a spreadsheet.
Restructuring also costs nothing extra, but it does ask more of an institution. Here, the challenge is to reorganise how people, time, and relationships are managed. A competitive internal grant scheme built around a new research-focused master’s degree would fall under this category. This could be a way to make university research budget allocations genuinely competitive rather than an automatic entitlement. This sort of reform needs a selection process and peer review, but not a larger budget.
Another idea is worth taking seriously. Each university could identify a defined catchment area (perhaps a cluster of nearby schools, colleges, and neighbourhoods) and commit its students to working within it. A three-month placement or volunteering period could be organised through an employability and social-duty directorate, rather than left to be decided by individual departments. The placement needn’t relate directly to the course that a student is studying. A geology student might tutor science at a local college, while an economics student could help a community library digitise its records. Such experiences help build skills in communication, project management, and boost students’ ability to explain specialist knowledge to people outside a particular field. Civic University Agreements in the United Kingdom, where universities make formal commitments to their local areas and manage engagement through dedicated offices, show how such a model can work without new central funding.
Resourcing is where the need for new money and national policy changes cannot be avoided. A national research council that funds projects based on their on their merit rather than being guided by institutional politics, scholarships tied to students rather than institutions, and funding formulas that reward research output rather than enrolment numbers are not radical ideas. Versions of these approaches already operate in the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, and Hong Kong. The key here is sequencing. Resource-tier reforms are the hardest to secure politically, but they become easier to argue for once redirecting and restructuring have already produced results which ministers and donors can see. Some Tk 200 crore being consolidated into a single university’s research fund in the current national budget provides a useful test of the model. Centralising the money is a resource-tier move in form. And unless it is paired with restructure-tier discipline—particularly competitive allocation rather than another round of equal distribution—it risks spending resource-tier money without achieving resource-tier change.
Such sequencing represents the real value of separating reform into tiers rather than treating it as one large, undifferentiated demand. A vice chancellor does not need permission from elsewhere to start redirecting elements. A faculty member does not need to wait for a new law to begin restructuring something this semester. This method will make it so that, by the time a ministry is asked to fund resource-tier reform, it won’t have to take a leap of faith on an untested idea, but instead support something that is already working, on a smaller scale, somewhere on campus.
The model is not specific to universities. Hospitals, civil service departments, and local government offices all face versions of the same stalled conversation: a real problem, an assumption that fixing it requires money that doesn’t exist, and inertia where momentum is needed. The redirect, restructure, and resource model gives the people implementing reform and the people reform is meant to serve the same vocabulary for understanding what can change immediately, what requires organisational change, and which reforms genuinely need new resources.
Mo Hoque is senior lecturer in hydrogeology and environmental geoscience at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He can be reached at [email protected].
Ashraf Dewan is director of research at the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University, Australia. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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