Who should be made a vice chancellor?

A vice chancellor is the academic and administrative CEO of a university. To understand the great importance of the post one must know what the principal function of a university is. Like all other educational institutions a university also propagates knowledge. But a university is different from all of them for a unique role it plays. A university creates knowledge, others do not. Therefore, a vice chancellor himself must have an outstanding academic career. He must have the academic excellence to create knowledge by carrying out research work himself in his own field of knowledge. He must also be able to provide leadership and guidance to other research scholars under him. The universally accepted yardstick to measure such academic competence is the number publications he publishes per year in internationally reputed professional journals.

The next qualification required of a vice chancellor is his administrative ability to efficiently handle matters related to general, financial and academic administration. All professors with academic excellence cannot make good vice chancellors. But all vice chancellors have to be academicians per se.

In a society like ours for a head of an educational or religious institution it is not enough to be firm and fair. S/he must also look firm and fair. S/he cannot be a political activist or conduct himself like a trade union leader. S/he cannot allow herself/himself to be carried away by any kind of sycophancy. Otherwise he is not acceptable to all his students and colleagues who will naturally be holding different political, social and religious ideologies. To be so a vice chancellor should be a person who is well known for his/her qualities of head and heart. In our country all our public universities have been having chronic problems of mismanagement, ill discipline and, most important of all, intellectual bankruptcy. Because, most of the time wrong persons were made vice chancellors purely on political considerations. Almost every time competence was the casualty.

One may argue that it may not be possible to get vice chancellors with the above mentioned qualities. To them I humbly suggest to look for the CV/ bio data of the vice chancellors of the universities in our neighboring country India. It is available on their websites.
To the best of our knowledge UGC, or any other authority, has never audited the academic works of our public universities. Tax payers of this poor country have never been told how many professional papers to create knowledge have been published by different departments/faculties of a public university in a year. We never knew how many such papers have been published by an individual before he was made a vice chancellor or a pro vice chancellor.

It is good that after a long unusual break of two years we now have an elected national parliament. Through the courtesy of this column of your esteemed daily may I request members of the parliament to find out through the ministry of education the number of professional publications our public universities have earned every year in the last 25 years. I would also request the appointing authority to let the people know about the academic career and the number of professional publications to their credit of the persons who have just been appointed as the vice chancellor and the pro vice chancellor of Dhaka University, my alma mater, the Oxford of the East.