Paper short abstract:

With the coming of the World Bank’s “quality enhancement” project, a neoliberal transformation of Bangladesh’s public universities is taking place through the introduction of various benchmarking practices. University administrators at large have been unaware of the politics of this transformation.

Paper long abstract:

The neoliberal transformation of universities is a phenomenon of the 1980s. In the US, state-run universities of the 1960s turned into state-assisted universities, giving rise to metaphors such as academic capitalism. There have been reported differences in the spread of neoliberalism in universities of the global North. Neoliberal universities have been forced to ally with the industry. Particular disciplines, having higher industry relevance, received priority; hence the importance of Biomedicine or Computer science. Social Sciences and Arts have always been in the decline throughout this transformative period. Research agendas in universities were also increasingly driven by corporations and the market. Transformation is more complete in the global North when it comes to the neo-liberal transformation of the university. With the coming of the World Bank-prescribed "quality enhancement" project for universities in Bangladesh, a similar transformation is envisaged through the introduction of various benchmarking practices. The proposed paper attempts to analyze this transformation and puts forward the argument that while on the fringe likeminded academicians through alternative organizational activities have often tried to imagine a different university, using euphemisms such as “What university do we wish to have?”, public university administrators in Bangladesh at large have been unaware of the politics of neoliberal transformation of the universities, the long term effect of the World Bank policy prescriptions and unwarily jumped into the bandwagon of the World Bank induced "improvement".