If there is one thing we have learned from the sorry spectacle of the past week at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology it is that students and their teachers/administrators should never be at such loggerheads with one another, and to the extent that any disagreement or demands devolves into prolonged protest it can be seen to be a failure of the authorities.
There needs to be mutual respect and a shared sense of responsibility on all sides of what should be, at the end of the day, a harmonious community.
Students and teachers/administrators should never be antagonists, and there need to be mechanisms in place for the airing and resolution of grievances.
High-handed refusal to engage with or to listen to legitimate complaints will inevitably snowball into something bigger and messier, and never ends well.
It was this mutual respect and shared sense of responsibility that was missing at SUST, and, as a result, what began as a peaceful protest to get the provost to resign over charges of misconduct eventually gave way to violent police intervention and the inevitable involvement of the ruling party’s student cadres. No one benefited from the escalation.
Even though the provost herself handed in her resignation relatively early on during the protests, by that time the situation had escalated precisely because of how poorly the initial demand had been handled.
There can be little doubt that the events which have transpired up until now can largely be ascribed to the mishandling of matters on the part of the university administration and then law enforcement.
It should be added at this stage that the usual heavy-handed manner in which law enforcement treated protesters and the even more sinister reports of targeting of supporters of the protesters, in ways that raise serious questions of constitutional rights and government overreach are utterly beyond the pale.
In a democracy, it is simply not acceptable to target financial supporters of legal protesters, as has been alleged. How the authorities have come to know who to target in this manner is also a question that needs answering.
At the end of the day, we need to bring the temperature down at SUST. The ending of the hunger strike through the intervention of noted former teachers is a salutary first step and precisely the kind of approach that we would like to see more of.
Let us hope that the matter can now be resolved in a reasoned and reasonable manner.
And let us not forget that had such an approach been employed at the beginning then SUST would have been spared the trauma of the past week.
