Truth, power, and the strained relations between students and teachers

When asked to comment on the recent trend of teacher harassment and forced resignation across university campuses, the University Grants Commission (UGC) chair and former vice-chancellor of Dhaka University, Prof SMA Faiz, observed that rules alone could not ensure healthy teacher-student ties. “The relationship falters when teachers don’t view students as their own children, and vice versa,” he said. 

The idea of viewing the campus through a familial lens is an insufficient evaluation of the strained relationship between two key stakeholders at our universities. The spectacle of students chasing teachers, drafting resignation letters for deans, and making arbitrary lists of “fascist enablers” is politically charged. It exudes power as memories are conveniently selected and weaponised to “ban” or “blacklist” teachers—not as guardians of the students but as ideological entities. This crisis is not moral or generational but political and biopolitical, marked by a collapse of institutional authority, unilateral punishment, and the weaponisation of memory intensified by electoral calculations. The display of power to control and regulate our campus life can even be explained through Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower. Some of the student leaders, emboldened by their win in the recent student union elections, which may have some impact on the national election come February 12, are not simply repressing a section of teachers, but working together with other technologies of power. 

On the surface, the student leaders present themselves as the voice of resistance, assuming ethical singularity by daring to speak truth to power. They would like to claim the fourth category of truth-tellers, the parrhesiastes (fearless public speakers). According to Foucault, the prophets are the first category of truth-tellers, revealing their arcane knowledge of the truth of destiny. The second category involves the sage who unwillingly shares their understanding of the essential truth of our being. Teachers belong to the third category with the professional obligation to perpetuate the truth they inherit. Foucault distinguishes the teacher, who reproduces inherited truth, from the parrhesiast, who risks everything to speak it. What we see on campuses today is neither.

Teachers hold institutional positions for which they remain both publicly visible and individually accountable while structurally tied to continuity. Their role is to reproduce knowledge and institutional order, not to mobilise crowds or wage moral crusades. Salahuddin Ammar, general secretary of Rajshahi University Central Students’ Union, is currently confronting some of these teachers as a self-appointed daring truth-teller. He is committed to “disciplining” the teachers accused of their purported involvement or silence during the fascist regime. But this “truth-telling” probably falls short of the Foucauldian fourth category. Socrates is a prime example of Foucault’s courageous parrhesiasm, willing to risk both his reputation and his life. Today’s campus “truth” is spoken under the protection of numbers and political patronage. 

Student leaders justify their actions by accusing the targeted teachers of their “fascist” past, silence or engagement with violence during the July uprising. These accusations are criminal in nature, warranting an independent investigation and potential punishment if proven guilty. Instead, we are seeing teachers being dragged, manhandled, named, and humiliated. 

To return to the family metaphor used by the UGC chair, I cannot help recalling William Wordsworth’s axiom, “The child is the father of the man.” It seems the inherent paradox captures our campus plight with uncomfortable precision. What we are witnessing resembles an Oedipal impulse stripped of psychoanalytic subtlety: the symbolic need to dethrone the alpha male to claim authority. In the law of the jungle, legitimacy is established not through care but through displacement. Student leaders no longer seek moral guidance from teachers or institutional elders; they seek to demonstrate that the old authority is expendable.

The role reversal of students disciplining teachers demonstrates how we have inverted the generational order on our campuses. These students no longer imagine themselves as inheritors of the institutional legacies. They think they are the judge, jury and executioner. Hence, they can beat outsiders or humiliate them by forcing them to hold their ears. They can publicly remind some VCs that they were the ones to put the administrative heads in power. Authority seems to flow not from statutes or governance apparatus but from “pressure groups” and “mob culture.” We have already seen results of such inversion through public confrontations, locked offices, and pre-drafted resignation letters. It will be a fallacy to see these actions as excesses of youthful anger. They are rehearsals of power intended to impact the next election. 

Political thinker Hannah Arendt’s distinction between power and violence can be useful to understand our campus situation. Power, according to Arendt who studied Nazism and Stalinism, relies on collective belief and consent. Once authority fails to command obedience, violence erupts. The July uprising is an example. But in the last one and a half years, we have not seen any solidifying of power. The scenes playing out on the campuses suggest not an abundance of student power, but its fragility. What sustains it is coercion: the so-called mobocracy. Education Adviser CR Abrar’s admission in The Daily Star report—“I am walking a very thin line”—confirms a similar fragility. It signals a state unwilling or unable to intervene, citing the autonomy of the universities while condemning assault. This hesitation allows intimidation through normalised governance. And the “governmentality” of the students before the national election exhibits a desire to prove ideological dominance with far-reaching impact. What works inside the university may later be exported beyond it. The election results across campuses overwhelmingly in favour of one party have excited such a possibility.

The narrative controlled by the students gets further established in the absence or the weakness of teachers’ associations. Teachers are fragmented and politicised, and they cannot collectively respond to their professional humiliation. There is no countervailing force to the coercion, no institutional buffer between accusation and punishment. Accountability becomes unilateral.

The call for mutual respect invoked by the UGC chair, although noble in its intent, is impossible in the present context. Respect is a reciprocal relationship. Prof Faiz understands this concept well, as he adds “vice versa” while using the parent-child metaphor. But how can we consider our campuses to be a family where justice is equated with humiliation and legitimacy with dominance? The long-term damage extends beyond the election cycle. Universities that cannot protect their staff or students cannot safeguard academic freedom. Students trained to equate political agency with coercion will struggle to practise democratic restraint. True, rules alone may not ensure healthy relationships.But without enforceable rules, ethical limits, and institutional courage, universities don’t become moral families; they turn into arenas where power is practised prematurely. Students exercise authority even before they have a real-life job. If universities are reduced to rehearsal spaces for domination, they will cease to function as institutions of learning long before they produce employable graduates or democratic citizens.

Dr Shamsad Mortuza is professor of English at Dhaka University. 

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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