Zombie graduates driven by rickshaw faculty – a qualitative case study: Private universities in urban Bangladesh
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bangladesh’s post-secondary education has become a hunting ground for local economic conglomerates and their transnational allies. Applying a holistic lens helps to understand the factors and short-term effects of blindly applying neo-liberal induced deregulation and privatization that constructed a mushrooming “McDonaldization” culture in the local post-secondary setting (Ball, 2003; Levin, 1998). The findings of a six-week-long study on Bangladeshi private universities, involving 32 interviews with students and faculty, civil society, and business community representatives and over 100 hours of ethnographic observation, contradict the ideal roles of universities in Bangladeshi society as they lead to demands that neither the universities nor the society can satisfy (Boulton and Lucas, 2011; Collini, 2012). These findings indicate this system constructs “zombie graduates” (Husain, forthcoming), who are entitlement happy yet lack critical understanding and suffer from acute ‘philosophical poverty’ (Husain, forthcoming). In addition, this paper highlights the psyche of upper-middle-class local students and how they reinforce a habitus for effective domination (Bourdieu, 1989, 1997). Finally, this paper critically analyses the imbalanced application of economics and philosophy in higher education governance and argues that the outcomes can hurt post-colonial Bangladeshi culture and society in the long run (Harvey, 2005; Sen, 2006). Critically, these impacts contribute to two arguments: White Men’s Germ on Brown Men’s Body (Husain, forthcoming) and Betrayal by the Intellectuals (Chatterjee, 2004; Orwell, 1949).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".