DU house tutors keep away from their roles
The VC says the authorities will monitor it
House tutors at Dhaka University dormitories are not serving their due role to maintain the standard of food and take care of students' health and their accommodation problems.
They are supposed to allocate rooms and beds to new students. Instead, the role is taken over by the ruling party-backed student bodies.
It is those political organisations that exercise supremacy and decide the fate of resident students. What it results in is students' becoming hostage to the will of political leaders.
As long as they serve their interests, putting their study in the second place, they stay. If they do otherwise, they get punished--political leaders drive them out of hall.
At the DU halls where, for severe accommodation crisis, resident students have to spend nights on balconies, rooftop or at hall mosques, house tutors are far from their roles to evict outsiders and fake, politically influential students who stay, often, singly in one room all the year round.
What is worse is student leaders rent hall rooms out to outsiders. According to the campus sources, the "business" is going on at more than five dormitories.
The university sources said house tutors have been deprived of their authority for over 30 years, as ruling party-backed student bodies take control over the entire range of matters of halls.
"Student leaders and their workers will agitate demanding my dismissal if I move to evict fake students and outsiders", a house tutor at Ziaur Rahman Hall told The Daily Star, seeking anonymity.
He blamed the university authorities for not taking steps to evict those illegal occupants for their political connections.
DU Vice-Chancellor Prof Dr AAMS Arefin Siddique, however, said the university authorities asked provosts and house tutors to perform their duty properly.
"We will conduct monitoring to ensure that house tutors deliver their best efforts for students", he added.
Students allege that house tutors also rarely visit the dining rooms to monitor if students are served sub-standard food or in unhygienic environment.
They hardly show up even if students suffer from illness while it is a duty of house tutors to take them to doctors and ensure proper treatment for them.
Asked, Saiful Haque, an assistant house tutor at Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Hall, trashed the allegations and said most of his colleagues perform their duty properly.
Prof Baitullah Quaderee, provost of the dormitory, however, suggested that provosts should make house tutors to perform their roles.
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