The real issues facing this sector may be discussed with reference to four factors: Academics and curricula; funding and fees; campus and facilities; and, founders and governors.

Academics and curricula Vice-Chancellors may come from a mainly academic background, but in this role their knack for enterprise management will be vastly more important than their scholarly one. This is true worldwide, especially for private universities, and even truer in a condition like ours. The sad truth is that there are few senior academics in Bangladesh who have the requisite managerial ability, because the public universities where they spent most of their working lives did not require them to hone such skills.

So, the government should make it easier for private universities to hire qualified foreigners as VC's. Also, the 18-year experience rule for Pro-VC's should be relaxed, so that dynamic young Bangladeshis with sufficient experience from abroad can come back and step into this role.

In terms of teaching staff, Bangladesh simply does not have enough qualified faculties to staff all the private (or, for that matter public) universities. The government should put in place a plan to graduate potential faculties in greater numbers, including allowing the better private universities to grant MPhil's and PhD's.

In view of this severe talent shortage, a proposed new law to restrict part-time faculties to no more than 20% of total faculties at private universities is also not helpful. In most private American universities, including those dominating the top 20 slots in most reputed global rankings, anywhere from one-third to one-half of all teaching staff, including teaching assistants, are part-timers (called "adjunct").

In the matter of curricula, private universities have actually introduced many positive innovations to tertiary education in this country, which was lacking in public universities. This speaks of the benefits of a diverse tertiary landscape.

The UGC's current system of passing a syllabus, for example, by sending it to an "expert," usually a public university veteran, ties private universities to the whims of individuals with very different views and priorities. This is grossly limiting and unfair to academics in the private universities.

The UGC also forbids even the tiniest changes to a syllabus without their permission. Such draconian and unhelpful rules need to be relaxed and modified to enforceable and meaningful limits. Encouragingly, the new leaders of UGC seem to be thinking with a more open mind than was ever the case in the recent past.

Funding and fees
Contrary to what most critics would like to believe, even if all the boards of private universities were staffed only with enlightened academics or civil society types, a majority of them would still face quality crunch due to sheer lack of capital (among other reasons).

Private universities usually flourish in an environment of large-scale government, corporate and philanthropic funding, which is quite absent in our culture. This leaves these fledgling institutions no choice but to rely on tuition fees.

There is a great deal of wailing about the alleged high fees of private universities. The real cost per student for a four-year degree at our public universities (based on posted budget and market value of assets) is actually no less than that of the better private universities. If the government paid the private universities equivalent subsidies, they too could then offer proportionately reduced fees.

Also, strikingly, a majority of them charge much less than most private English medium schools on a monthly basis. In light of these facts, the allegation of high fees seems to be either misinformed or populist pandering.

The government is in the right to demand that all private universities be run as non-profit institutions, meaning producing no personal gains for its governors or any other members. The UGC has smartly asked for audited financial reports from now on. But, to insist that these institutions be non-profit and, at the same time, to impose tax on them is frankly a preposterous contradiction.

Nowhere in the world do non-profits pay taxes. Why, in this country alone, must we have to make cases long settled globally? An immediate repeal of this policy is vital to the long-term viability of this sector.

Campus and facilities
A frequent criticism of private universities is that none of them has managed to move to a permanent five acre campus stipulated by the law. From a legal point of view, most of them are in breach of the rule, and the UGC was right to show-cause them recently. The UGC, and even higher authorities, would do better to review the very wisdom of the law.

I studied for seven years at New York University during my doctoral work. NYU is a private university with an endowment in the billions of dollars -- yes, billion, not million! -- and an enrollment of 30,000 students, the majority of them undergraduates.

Yet, NYU has no green campus nor any playing fields of its own, and certainly not in the city. Located as it is in the heart of a metropolis such as Manhattan, how can it?

NYU's campus consists of dozens of buildings of varying sizes, mostly not built for this purpose, scattered over many city blocks, and jostles with commercial and residential operations on commercial and semi-residential streets. This kind of set up is not only true for NYU, but also for a majority of the modern universities in the major metropolises of the world.

No one in those cities or countries claims that these institutions are cheating their students for lack of a green campus. The five acre rule is also illogical on other counts. Why a fixed five acre requirement?

Within a few years the biggest universities in this sector will come to enroll 20-30,000 students, while a few will strategically restrict themselves to 2-3,000. Does it make sense for both types of universities to have a five acre campus? It would make more sense to have square footage ratio requirement. Private universities should be allowed 15 years to develop a one acre campus in the capital, two acres elsewhere.

Meantime, commercial buildings with adequate parking in the city should be acceptable as campus buildings, as they are all over the world. The campus buildings should, however, be required to be custom-designed and dedicated, meaning not shared with other types of operations.

The funds required to build a five acre campus, especially within the first five years, will actually be an utter waste of valuable resources in our context. It would be far better to adopt some realistic and graduated campus requirements and actually enforce them, and to use the saved resources to build up other facilitieslibrary, labs, IT, faculty training, etc.

Founders and governors
Reports portray the governors of private universities as villains, who are supposedly singularly responsible for all the ailments of this sector. Never mind that without their hard earned seed money, even the best in this sector would never come into existence at all.

Obliviousness to the saliency of this point stems in great part from the fundamental anti-investor mindset of our society. Admittedly, a great many of them lack proper understanding of how to run such institutions. But, many who started out in this vein have already corrected their attitudes, and most others would probably do the same under a proper regulatory and competitive environment.

Whatever the shortcomings of the governors in this early stage of growth and learning, to think that the sector can do without them is naively willful, yet we are about to promulgate laws intended to do precisely that. Out of the 25 seats in the proposed Accreditation Council, allocations have been made for all manners of stakeholders, including outsiders, but not a single one for governors.

Can anyone conceive of another sector where, in this age of participatory governance, a critical stakeholder can be so egregiously shut out? The government should review this provision immediately, and make room for at least three governors at this table of 25.

Another law mandates that vice-chancellors be heads not only of academic councils but also of governing councils. This may be the single most misguided new law. Even VC's need to be answerable to someone.

If they head the Governing Council, then whom would they report or answer to? Governing boards or councils in most international universities, like in the US and UK, are headed by a non-academic trustee (indeed, often a businessman in America), and the VC (or, the president in America) answers to this board. Making VC's the head of both councils completely removes this structure of checks and balances.

I was recently at a round table discussion in which a renowned public university faculty was lamenting the lack of accountability among public university professors, and praising the opposite scenario in most private universities. Effectively, he attested to the fact that academics in our culture have not been able at all in holding each other accountable. The non-academic boards at private universities, despite their heavy handedness at times, can serve critical balancing functions.

Nothing can be more damaging for our fledgling private university sector than laws that try to recreate them in the image of our dysfunctional public universities. Governors and academics are not an either/or option for this sector.

The law must encourage and allow them both to play their due roles, and not try to remove one from the picture altogether. The government must re-think its attitude toward critical stakeholders like the founders and governors, and (re)engage with them in a more positive manner.

There is absolutely no alternative to a more balanced dialogue, one that is fully informed, both of global standards and trends and also of local constraints. The government is best positioned to lead a dialogue among all critical stakeholders.

The media, too, can take up more informed reporting, instead of only trying to scapegoat an identified target. The sector is too important and too full of promise to be sacrificed to momentary or partisan hysteria.

The government, more than anyone else, must be careful not to give excessive credence to the criticisms of the false friends of this sector, but reach out to all the real stakeholders who can ultimately determine its fate.

Dr. K. Anis Ahmed is Director, Academic Affairs at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.