Who are responsible for campus anarchy?
Saturday, 24 April 2010
It refers to the news that activists claiming to belong to the student organisation, which has historic links with the ruling party, set a Chittagong University teachers' bus on fire to press home their five-point demand. This is alarming, to say the least. The student organisation appears to have decided to get everything they demand through the use of brute force.
What haven't they done in the last 15 months? In the latest instance, some students of the Chittagong University are said to have wanted to set up stalls on the campus on the occasion of the Pahela Baishakh for business purposes. The Vice-Chancellor of the university reportedly turned down the proposal. And the students started a movement to oust him!
Now, the question is: who should run the university? The student wing's goons or the VC? Or indeed do the education ministry, the government or the ruling party feel any pinch of responsibility? One cannot but keep on asking who is actually responsible, apart from the student activists, for the situation now prevailing in the academic arena?
Gopal Sengupta
McGill University, Canada,
gopal.sengupta@mail.mcgill.ca
What haven't they done in the last 15 months? In the latest instance, some students of the Chittagong University are said to have wanted to set up stalls on the campus on the occasion of the Pahela Baishakh for business purposes. The Vice-Chancellor of the university reportedly turned down the proposal. And the students started a movement to oust him!
Now, the question is: who should run the university? The student wing's goons or the VC? Or indeed do the education ministry, the government or the ruling party feel any pinch of responsibility? One cannot but keep on asking who is actually responsible, apart from the student activists, for the situation now prevailing in the academic arena?
Gopal Sengupta
McGill University, Canada,
gopal.sengupta@mail.mcgill.ca