ABSTRACT
This essay charts the elaborate developments in public policy that prefigure the neo-liberal turn within postcolonial university-contexts across sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh. Despite the distinctiveness of historical conditions that drive the fortunes of the public university within divergent developmental trajectories, Hussain’s comparative approach attempts to trace the ‘logic of pre-emption’ that conjoins the imagined futures of the postcolony. While within the African context, the declaredly anti-colonial university system and its redistributive agendas of social-economic justice face rebuttal in the structural adjustment programmes unleashed by the ‘Washington Consensus’, a South Asian case-study in Bangladesh sees an opportune coincidence between mass movements against military authoritarianism and the geopolitical dreams of ‘growth’ peddled by liberalization regimes. With privatized public universities striking the middle class conscience as hotbeds of ‘dirty politics’ – through devious mechanisms of state support – intellectual communities are left to fight massive resource cuts, adjunctification of teaching labour, religious-extremist witch-hunts and corporate research lobbies.
