Chief adviser urges South Asian academics to align education with youth aspirations
Chief adviser professor Muhammad Yunus on Tuesday called upon the academics to align the education system with the youths’ expectations and aspirations and stressed on revival of the SAARC (South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation) to enhance regional academic cooperation.
“Today, I feel very excited that academics at the highest level could get together in Dhaka. It’s important that this is Dhaka. I hope you will have a chance to kind of review of the things that have happened in Dhaka in the past few months,” he said, referring to post-2024 July Uprising events in Bangladesh.
The chief adviser made the remarks while addressing the inaugural ceremony of the three-day “South Asian Regional Conference on State of Higher Education and Future Pathway (SARCHE 2026)” at a city hotel here.
A total of 30 international representatives, including delegates from the United Kingdom, the Maldives, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as well as representatives from the World Bank are participating in the event.
The conference is being organised under the Bangladesh government and World Bank funded Higher Education Acceleration and Transformation (HEAT) Project of the University Grants Commission (UGC) of Bangladesh.
Professor Yunus said review of those events will clarify what university education and education as a whole are really about, adding, this should be the core subject of discussion at the gathering.
Highlighting the role of students in the 2024 uprising, he said, “Who are these young people that we are dealing with? They have their own mind. They stood up and raised their voices and brought down the ugliest fascist regime you could ever think of given their lives”.
“It would be a missed opportunity if you don’t spend some time on understanding what they did a few months back in this very city. What was their expectation? What was their aspiration? Why did they stand up in front of guns and give their lives knowingly it will happen,” the chief adviser said.
To reflect the students’ motivation behind joining the uprising, he referred to school student Shaheed Shahriar Khan Anas’s letter, which he wrote to his mother before embracing the martyrdom, stating that it was his duty to take to the street with his friends, who were subjected to state-sponsored crackdown.
Noting that the event was not a sudden outburst, Muhammad Yunus said it happened in Sri Lanka and in Nepal too, but it happened in a bigger way in Dhaka.