The Dhaka University celebrates its centenary this year as it opened its doors on July 1, 1921. Its patrons particularly, Nawab Sir Khwaja Salimullah by donating 600 acres of land, steered the new institution with Oxford University’s academic model of a residential institution where the students would primarily live in the campus.
The reason was a rebuff to the Kolkata University’s sneer of elegant society, suspicion, and often disdainful gestures to the very fresh initiative, the first center of highest learning in East Bengal’s rural and neglected region.
The pioneers aspired that, the students would learn in the classrooms as well as in their respective halls of residence with counselling from their provosts and house tutors, who would simultaneously be the university’s teachers according to the standard of the Oxford as those were the core concept then.
Dr. Philip Joseph Hartog, an academic registrar of the University of London for 17 years became the first vice-chancellor of the university. In half-century later it played a central role in the rise of Bengali nationalism and the independence of Bangladesh in 1971.
Pic of Dhaka University from https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/growing-in-size-shrinking-in-standard
