This article is about a private university in Bangladesh.With Government permission received on April 29, 2013, and with hopes of beginning the University in a small way in 2014, it is worthwhile to understand how we got to this point. This short write-up is not a detailed history of the events leading to the founding of the university. This rather is a picture of the different influences that hav
e brought us this far. Very early in the history of the educational ministry of Holy Cross Fathers in Bangladesh, there was a talk of starting a University. The Notre Dame College was then staffed almost exclusively by expatriate missionaries who came with advanced degrees in hand to teach. The College began in 1949 at the Intermediate level and in the years to the Liberation War (1971) was small in size and well-staffed with such missionaries. After Independence everything changed to Bengali-medium and almost all of the expatriates withdrew and there were only then a few local CSC priests called to do a variety of ministries. The College got down to 2 men full-time. Any thought of a university was long gone. There was concern to keep the college going. The question of a university rose again on a variety of tracks:
An outside evaluation of the College suggested it to be considered. The Bishops of Bangladesh raised the issue – to have the Church present at this level and to witness in this way. The alumni of Notre Dame College on several occasions strongly recommended to the Holy Cross Fathers a vertical expansion of the institution of the university level. The Government announced a new education policy, basically going over to the American system: Primary School: 1 to class 8; High School: classes 9-12; College (Hons.): 4 year degree
If this were implemented, the College (Notre Dame) would need to be changed completely. The present classes 11 and 12 would only be the last two years of high school. A fourth year would have to be added to the present three-year degree (pass) course. The College started planning how classes 9 and 10 could be added and what it would mean for the College to be a high school. The crucial question was adding another year to the degree program. With the gaps in the system, the four years would take six or more years. The Holy Cross Fathers began to think that if we were able to start a private university, we could create our own syllabus, hold our own exams, confer our own degrees and do four years in four years. When it became known that we were thinking again about it, a number of people came forward to encourage us: Education leaders, Community leaders, College Alumni, the Papal Nuncio (Archbishop Joseph Marino), Government people, the German Embassy, etc. The idea picked up impetus. We felt that, with help from Notre Dame College, the idea might be feasible. Maybe we would start small and let it grow. We became more optimistic. We soon realized what a complicated process was involved in making application to the University Grants Commission, securing in the University’s name land donated by the College, establishing the required reserve fund. The final application when fully completed is a book almost 6 inches thick. We have finally received permission, secured the land, made a design for the University Building and are putting together the practical aspects of beginning, especially working out with the College the details of sharing space, finances, scheduling, etc. The effort is underway to seek the funding to build the University building, looking at both foreign and local benefactors. We have come this far and are determined and committed to go forward. We count on the blessings of God and the help of many interested supporters. Notre Dame University Bangladesh is a long-cherished dream coming true. There is still so much work ahead of us but we keep reminding ourselves that “If there is a will, there is a way”. We, with the support and encouragement of many, have the will and are seeking the way. Sound Values:
So many post colonial societies are in-between a cultural heritage in which parents have been formed and into which some have tried to lead their children, and an increasingly dominant world pulling us all, but especially youth, in an opposite direction. Yet few are equipped to recognize the powerfully attracting forces at work, so simply take the world presented a ’future- fact’, to which they must adapt or lose the race. And all too often, educational institutions exacerbate this anxiety by presenting themselves as promoting ‘success’. So for those young people who feel the need to acquire a perspective from which to assess their goals, we offer the quality of education exhibited in our ‘Core Course’, to help them develop an historical and critical appraisal of the world about us. Some may find this to be too high an aspiration for young people, yet whoever is seeking the education we aspire to offer will already have sensed something amiss in the way a world has been deliberatelydesigned to attract them. So they will be seeking ways to attain their own critical purchase on a contested past, as they try to discern a future to which they can constructively contribute. That has been, of course, the perennial appeal of education to a privileged portion of young people who aspire to more than ‘making it’, as they seek a way beyond the ‘dead hand’ of the past. Yet again, our program seeks to liberate them precisely by helping them assimilate those features of a tradition that can equip them to face an uncertain future imaginatively and critically. The resources required are multiple—religious, familial, cultural—so an education like ours which calls upon all three should be able to build confidence in the young to find a way that is theirs: cultural, familial, religious. All this can be summarized under the rubric of ‘values’, yet we need to spell that out in words and in deeds, in university practices even more then in classroom teaching. So each university officer becomes a teacher of ‘sound values’ by the way they approach their work of molding an institution faithful to the founding vision. Our Holy Cross tradition invokes ‘head and heart’, as a way of integrating practice with teaching. The proof will be found in daily fidelity to practices conducive to such integration. That is why we insist that education at Notre Dame will have to be interactive, involving students, faculty, and staff in a shared endeavor. As we learn from each other, respecting our differences, we will come to realize the genius of a ‘university’: unity out of diversity.
