TBT Report
Professor Shahid Akhtar Hossain, a prominent academician, recently joined Eastern University (EU) as the university’s Vice-Chancellor. Prior to joining EU, Dr. Hossain served as the pro-vice-chancellor of Dhaka University (DU) and as a Professor of the Department of Soil, Water and Environment of DU.
In a recent interview, Professor Shahid Akhtar Hossain expressed his thoughts about his new role at the EU. According to him, Bangladesh is a populated country that limits the opportunity of higher education for many. Thus, it provides huge scope for private universities to recruit good quality teachers and make sure that students who are unable to enroll into the public universities can get high quality education.
As I have bestowed upon with this opportunity, I will make best effort to transform EU into a top tier university in the country through my talent and hard work. My vision is to see Eastern University as a research university along with the world renowned universities of the world. I believe in knowledge creation, accumulation and dissemination. As a result, research activities would be our priority area as well as providing good quality education. If we want to see Bangladesh as a developed nation on the world map, then there is no alternative to research. I hope with everyone’s support I can successfully fulfill this mission.
We are bringing significant changes to the current curriculum of the university. We hope to increase our curriculum’s diversity by following the University Grant Commission’s guideline. Because we firmly believe that a student can never become a careerist with just reading texts-books. We are giving utmost importance to create alliance with the industry so that the students can have the opportunity to gain professional experience. I would like to invite the industry leaders to contribute to build a lab or a research center at the university so that it becomes easier for us to create skilled human resources. They need to disburse more funds to make meaningful investment in this sector. This process is well familiar around the world as Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR) activities should be given much spotlight by the not for profit organization like us.
Our motto is to create enlightened, patriotic and skilled graduates. We aim to equip our graduates with 21st century skills and at the same time instill human values through our teachings.
He added that, both the academic environment for the students and working milieu for the faculty members in the university is held in extremely high standards. It feels good to know that the university has 18 different clubs that are enabling students to participate in various extra-curricular activities. We believe that we just cannot judge a student’s ability of traditional means of education. For this, strong culture of co-curricular programs is essential at university premises. When we will be moving to our permanent campus we will be in a strong position to leverage academic activities with that of co-curricular activities.
EU provides best opportunities for the poor meritorious students of Bangladesh. I firmly believe that the university is unrivaled in providing higher number scholarship and discounted education to the students. This university has already established as a non-profit higher educational institute in the country.