A crucial question pervades the public university spheres: when a public university makes a decision that affects a faculty member’s career, livelihood, or professional standing, who is actually accountable for that decision? The most likely answer, is nobody in particular.
This is a structural reality at Bangladeshi public universities. Bangladesh has around sixty public universities, all of them created by Acts of Parliament, funded by the state, and governed by statutes that define how they must function, hence can be called statutory institutions. This legal architecture should make them among the most accountable institutions in the country, however, in practice, often the gap between what the law requires and what actually happens inside these institutions, is wide.
Let’s take the matter of academic promotion. Every public university has a set of prescribed criteria for promotion. This is often amended and updated, responding to the academic landscape and ratified by the respective governing bodies such as the syndicate and the academic council.
These criteria exist precisely to ensure that the process is objective, consistent, and insulated from personal discretion. A faculty member who meets those criteria has a legitimate professional interest in being assessed fairly against them. Under Articles 27 and 29 of the Constitution of Bangladesh, every citizen is entitled to equal protection of the law and equality of opportunity in public employment. Promotion in a public university is public employment. These constitutional guarantees are enforceable and not simply decorative.
Here some crucial queries arise: what happens when a promotion process goes wrong? When a review board applies criteria that are not in the university’s own ordinance? When documentary evidence that was officially solicited is then disregarded at the point of decision with no explanation? When the outcome is neither communicated nor explained to the applicant for months, despite repeated formal and written requests? What legal remedy exists, and how accessible is it to the aggrieved individuals?
The answer, again, is that the remedy exists in law but is distant in practice. Article 102 of the Constitution gives every citizen the right to approach the High Court Division of the Supreme Court when a public authority acts unlawfully or in violation of fundamental rights. The principles of natural justice, which are part of Bangladesh’s common law, require that any body making a decision affecting an individual’s rights must hear that person’s case, consider the evidence before it, and not act on grounds that are extraneous, prejudicial or invented. These are legally binding requirements, and courts have enforcing authority against public universities in Bangladesh.
A faculty member who wants to challenge a promotion decision fearing unfair assessment of their credentials must retain an advocate, file a writ petition before the High Court, survive the procedural complexity of rule nisi proceedings, and wait for a case to be heard on a busy court docket. This can take months. In the meantime, salary differentials accumulate, career development opportunities pass, and the professional consequences of the original wrong compound quietly with every passing month, not to mention the usual collegial harassments, peer frowning, and mental trauma. The path is arduous.
An example of academic fairness in promotion and appeal procedure can be drawn from one of the world’s top universities (UNSW Sydney), reputed for its academic excellence and procedural transparency. At the University of New South Wales in Australia, for instance, academic staff have a formal right to appeal any adverse promotion decision on procedural fairness grounds within ten working days of notification.
The July Uprising of 2024 created a strong public demand for accountability, transparency, and an end to discrimination and arbitrary authority in Bangladesh. Universities led by new leadership have a responsibility to transform this momentum into meaningful institutional reform
A designated senior officer investigates the appeal, issues a written outcome, and, if procedural irregularity is found to have materially affected the result, returns the application for fresh consideration. Unsuccessful candidates are also entitled to formal written feedback as a matter of course. It is what procedural fairness looks like when it is taken seriously as an institutional obligation rather than a discretionary convention.
The lack of any substantial, effective, and publicly available grievance policy is another serious governance loophole among Bangladeshi public universities, leading to numerous structural and prejudicial injustices. Some private universities are developing such grievance policies, including universities like East West University, an example that public universities must follow to ensure academic fairness and avoid instances of micro injustices happening at the university level that often skip national attention.
The UGC, as the statutory regulator, exists, among other purposes, to ensure that public universities comply with their own governing statutes and maintain standards of academic governance. It has the authority to investigate complaints against universities and to recommend corrective action or internal resolutions. But there is currently no clear, published, accessible mechanism through which an individual faculty member can bring a specific complaint of procedural unfairness to the UGC and expect a defined process of investigation and response.
Gladly enough, something is better than nothing: there is a sketchy portal on the UGC website for complaint submission that allows affected individuals to bring matters within UGC’s purview, though it offers little detail on how it handles cases involving procedural irregularities in public university faculty promotions Thus, the oversight framework’s operational machinery, in this area at least, remains underdeveloped.
The framework of genuine accountability starts with something very simple: written reasons. When a promotion review board makes an adverse recommendation, the affected applicant should receive a formal written statement explaining which criteria were applied, how each qualifying item was assessed, and on what specific ground any submitted documentation was found insufficient. This is a standard practice in universities with well-developed higher education systems. It is also what the principles of natural justice require. An applicant who does not know why they were turned down cannot effectively challenge the decision, cannot learn from the process, and cannot have any confidence that the process was fair.
In many Bangladeshi public universities, the specific standards applied in promotion decisions are not publicly notified in a manner accessible to faculty members in advance. The ordinance may state the minimum requirements, but the interpretive framework applied by review boards, the weight given to different types of publications, the treatment of interdisciplinary or internationally published work, the standards of evidence expected for forthcoming publications: these are often applied inconsistently and arbitrarily, without prior notice, and without any published precedent that a faculty member could consult.
The July Uprising of 2024 created a strong public demand for accountability, transparency, and an end to discrimination and arbitrary authority in Bangladesh. Universities led by new leadership have a responsibility to transform this momentum into meaningful institutional reform. The accountability structure of promotion reform needs to add three components.
First, a binding obligation to furnish written reasons for all adverse promotion decisions within a defined time period. Second, a publicly notified, transparent framework of promotion criteria, updated regularly to reflect contemporary standards of scholarship, including interdisciplinary research. Third, an accessible, independent internal appeal mechanism that allows a faculty member to challenge an adverse decision before reaching the courts.
All of these measures are consistent with the constitutional framework that governs these institutions. Here, the law is not the problem. The question is whether the institutions that exist within it are willing to be held to it; the willingness is what accountability actually requires.
* Kazi Ashraf Uddin is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Jahangirnagar University and a doctoral candidate at the UNSW Sydney’s Law School.
* The views expressed here are the authors own