The New Nation - Internet Edition

Jamal Uddin Jami

Faced with a session jam of about five months, Dhaka, Rajshahi and Jagannath universities will reopen today after sixty-seven days of unscheduled closure following violent student unrest.

Classes and other academic activities of the universities will begin from today, while postponed examinations will start from the first week of November.

Earlier, the residential halls of DU reopened on October 23. Most of the students have returned to their respective dormitories and the university's usual outlook has returned.

In a press release, the DU Syndicate expected cooperation from all concerned including law-enforcing agencies so that such incidents do not occur in future and the academic activities of the University continued uninterruptedly.

The Syndicate meeting presided over by Vice-Chancellor Prof SMA Faiz was held last night.

The meeting appreciated the decision of Dhaka University

Teachers' Association (DUTA) as they decided to attend classes from today.

Teachers of the university declared at a press conference on Friday that they would return to the class and take part in every academic activity.

But they requested the government to release their detained colleagues, who were arrested for allegedly provoking the student unrest.

Some 630 examinations of 49 departments and seven Institutes were deferred during the closure of the university.

The students of 2nd year, 3rd year and 4th year honours classes have to suffer due to the sixty-seven days of unscheduled closure and deferment of scheduled examinations. They face a session jam of almost five months.

On the other hand, the students of fourth year worried that if their examinations were not held by January they would not be able to appear in the 28th BCS competitive examination.

Some students of Dhaka University got involved in violence with army personnel at the university gymnasium playground centering a trifle matter during watching a football match held between Public Administration and Journalism Department of the university.

The incident spread among the students of the university and later the students demonstrated demanding withdrawal of Army camps from the university campus.

As per their demand, the government decided to withdraw the army camp from the DU campus within 12 hours.

However, the movement of the students did not stop rather it spread across the country.

To bring the situation under control, the Government imposed curfew in six divisional cities and declared all educational institutions including, universities, colleges and schools closed sine die.

Although the government withdrew the order on private universities, colleges and schools of the six divisional cities after few days but the public universities remained closed.

Later, the Education Adviser Dr Ayub Quadri held a meeting with the VCs of the public universities and gave some directions to them about the reopening of the universities.

After the meeting, all the public universities reopened except five universities, Dhaka, Jagannath, Jahangirnagar, Rajshahi and Chittagong University.

Jahangirnagar and Chittagang universities reopened last week.