It was interesting to follow recent discussions surrounding the proposed or likely developments in merging some departments at Dhaka University as well as making traditional humanities departments like Bangla, History, and Philosophy redundant in honours programmes under the National University. This approach of merging or scrapping is typical of Western countries, governed by a neoliberal ethos of policymaking where disciplines and schools with more applied or market value are prioritised. Australia, for instance, has embarked on this path through university mergers. The University of South Australia and the University of Adelaide have recently merged to form a single, brand-new Adelaide University.
One immediate consequence of such measures, however, has been a lack of disciplinary coordination and uncertainty among students about how their ongoing degrees would fit into the new institutional and disciplinary structure. While this confusion directly affects students’ academic lives, faculty and staff members are often the worst affected by such cost-cutting measures.
Some in Bangladesh are criticising the proposals to consolidate or abandon certain disciplines. However, it should be noted that the real damage was done when over-fragmentation of disciplines as well as arbitrary introduction of new departments and universities became a common means of political rehabilitation under the last Awami League regime. The unchecked establishment of new departments and universities without adequate structural planning or quality assurance inevitably led to irregularities in teacher recruitment and student admissions—a foreseeable consequence that was overlooked in the pursuit of political gains.
In recent years, the marginalisation of the humanities has attracted pushback from critical pedagogues around the world. They feel that, at a time of rising global humanitarian crises, geopolitical tensions, and erosion of human values, the world needs humanities disciplines more than ever. Judging disciplines in faculties like humanities and human sciences solely based on their immediate market value risks undermining their broader societal contribution, with consequences that could affect millions of lives.
Parallelly, there is a growing conversation on the need to integrate the humanities across disciplines like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In this connection, one can cite Martha C. Nussbaum, one of the most prominent scholars advocating for the integration of the humanities into legal education. As a philosopher and legal scholar at the University of Chicago Law School, she has argued that law students need a broad humanistic education—including literature, philosophy, history, and the arts—to develop empathy, critical reasoning, ethical judgement, and global citizenship.
Against this backdrop, disciplinary restructuring has become an increasingly common trend among Western universities (often disguising the redundancy and cost-cutting logic beneath it). For example, the Criminology programme at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), formerly belonging to the broader arts and social sciences faculty, was moved to the Law and Justice faculty. While this opened up new dimensions of research and professional networking, it also created discomfort and academic adjustment issues. Often, such restructuring has also been accompanied by academic and administrative layoffs—an underlying objective that universities are often reluctant to acknowledge.
All things considered, what universities in Bangladesh need is a comprehensive curricular revision that reflects contemporary interdisciplinary praxis across many departments. Take the case of the Department of English at Jahangirnagar University. Although English departments’ disciplinary scope is commonly understood to be confined to language and literature, its incorporation of interdisciplinary approaches involving courses like Cultural Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Translation Studies, Applied Linguistics, Professional Communication, and Critical Pedagogy has provided wide disciplinary adaptability to its graduates, both at home and internationally.
Within this logic, interdisciplinary research should be actively promoted to foster collaboration and mutual respect across faculties. Some universities, like Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, have already demonstrated this approach by accommodating departments like English within their social sciences faculty.
Brac University offers another useful example. Its centralised General Education curriculum provides all students with a shared intellectual foundation across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and interdisciplinary studies before they enter their specialised disciplines, promoting a common language of inquiry and critical thinking. By bringing together students from diverse academic backgrounds during their early years at university, the programme fosters interdisciplinary learning and a deeper appreciation of the interconnected nature of knowledge, research, and social problem-solving, which is also reflected in the wide-ranging disciplinary placement of the graduates.
Moreover, abandoning departments like Bangla at the graduate level may have profound consequences for the nation’s collective psychology and cultural identity, with lasting implications for national belonging and our cultural standing in the world. A more productive alternative would be proper curricular revision combined with administrative restructuring. New humanities courses like Memory Studies, Partition Studies, Computational Linguistics, or Affect Studies, alongside graded ethnographic fieldwork, could be incorporated as part of curricular revision. Renaming departments to reflect broader disciplinary developments could also complement such reforms.
Additionally, social sciences faculties could open Schools of Language Studies in which language- and culture-based departments coexist as distinct units. Such restructuring would also ensure greater alignment with international disciplinary trends and practices. An example of multidisciplinary expertise can be drawn from Jahangirnagar University’s Bangla department, where a faculty member has excelled in conducting computational and data-driven research on Bangla and other ethnic languages.
I am not advocating the outright rejection of the neoliberal emphasis on employability in the fields of education. Rather, I am calling for cautious and context-sensitive education policymaking that reflects both global and local contexts without compromising the intellectual traditions of Bangladesh. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has a crucial role to play in assessing the structural and intellectual needs of universities before making any recommendations on establishing, merging, or restructuring academic units or revising state funding at the university level. Educationists and pedagogues must also be meaningfully consulted before any major restructuring is undertaken.
Ultimately, what higher education needs at this moment is not arbitrary adoption of market logic but a careful reassessment of global disciplinary trends, local labour-market realities, and the future direction of university curricula.
Kazi Ashraf Uddin is a doctoral researcher at UNSW Sydney, associate professor at Jahangirnagar University, and former faculty member at BRAC University.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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