University of Chittagong: The Hill Campus University of Bangladesh

The University of Chittagong is a public research university spread across a vast hill campus at Fatehpur in Hathazari upazila, about 22 kilometres north of Chittagong city. Founded in 1966, it is one of the oldest universities in Bangladesh and, by land area, the largest: the university's own figure for the campus is 1,754 acres of hills and flat land, and some recent reports put its total land at close to 2,300 acres. It is a self-governing university, reconstituted after independence under its own Act of 1973. Generations of students know it as much for its landscape — green ridges, a lake-dotted valley and a campus railway station — as for its classrooms, and its daily life runs to the timetable of the shuttle trains that carry thousands of students between the port city and the hills.

A University Demanded by a Region

The idea of a university for Chittagong long predates the institution. As early as December 1940, Maulana Moniruzzaman Islamabadi proposed a university for the region at an All-India conference in Calcutta, and in 1942 Nur Ahmad raised the demand formally in the Bengal Legislative Assembly. The campaign became organised in 1961 with the formation of the Chittagong University Movement Council, led by social worker Badshah Mia Chowdhury with Professor Ahmad Hossain of Chittagong City College as convenor. Leading intellectuals, among them Dr Muhammad Shahidullah and Dr Muhammad Enamul Haq, joined the arguments over where the university should stand.

In 1962 Mohammad Ferdaus Khan, the deputy director of public instruction for East Pakistan, prepared a preliminary draft plan. Funding followed at a National Economic Council meeting on 9 March 1964, and the site chosen was a stretch of hilly land at Fatehpur in Hathazari, north of the city. President Ayub Khan laid the foundation stone on 29 August 1964. The choice of a secluded hill site, far from the city it served, shaped everything about the university that followed — its residential character, its beauty and its transport problem.

Foundation and First Years

The work of actually building the university fell to Professor Azizur Rahman Mallick, a historian from the University of Rajshahi and former curator of the Varendra Research Museum. Appointed project director on 3 December 1965, he opened a small project office — three employees, one typewriter and a photocopier, as the university's own history records — in a house in Chittagong city's Nasirabad Housing Society.

The Chittagong University Ordinance was promulgated on 25 September 1966, and Mallick was given charge as the first vice-chancellor the same day, taking up the post on 9 October. The university was formally opened on 18 November 1966, a date still celebrated every year as University Day. Teaching began ten days later, on 28 November, when MA (Preliminary) classes started for 200 students in four departments — Bangla, English, History and Economics — under a single Faculty of Arts, with just seven teachers including the vice-chancellor himself.

Professional colleges outside the campus — medical, engineering, law and education — were soon incorporated as faculties, so the university's reach extended into the city from the start. After the Liberation War, the 1966 Ordinance was replaced by the Chittagong University Act of 1973, which reconstituted the university with effect from 16 December 1972 and confirmed the self-governing status it shares with the University of Dhaka and the other universities run under their own acts.

The Hill Campus

Few universities in South Asia occupy a landscape like this one. The campus folds across ridges and valleys at Fatehpur, with academic buildings scattered among hills rather than arranged on a grid, and a central field and lake in the low ground. It is a substantially residential university: 14 halls of residence — nine for men and five for women — house a large share of its students, alongside a hostel, and much of the teaching staff lives on or near the campus.

The Chittagong University Museum, established in 1973, is one of the campus's distinctive institutions. It grew out of an exhibition of artefacts by the Department of History at the university's inauguration, and Professor Abdul Karim, the historian who then headed the department, was entrusted by Mallick with building it into a museum. Its collections range from ancient sculpture and coins to the records and photographs of the university's own martyrs of 1971, making it both a research resource and the campus's memory. Student politics has its own long-standing institution: the Chittagong University Central Students' Union (CUCSU), founded with the university in 1966, whose constitution was adopted in a new form in 2025.

The Shuttle Train

The price of a hill campus 22 kilometres from the city was a transport problem, and the university's answer became its most famous feature. In 1980, in cooperation with Bangladesh Railway, a dedicated shuttle train service began running between Battali station in Chittagong city and the university's own station. Student life reorganised itself around the trains: lecture and even examination timetables are set with the shuttle schedule in mind.

The service still defines the university. Two shuttle trains and a DEMU train make repeated trips through the day, carrying on the order of ten thousand students in each direction. The trains are woven into campus folklore — songs, romances and a feature film have been made about them — and the university is widely described as the only university in the world that still runs its own shuttle trains, a comparable service at the University of San Francisco having been withdrawn. The claim is impossible to audit globally, but no rival claimant is usually named. The service is not a museum piece: in June 2026 the vice-chancellor inaugurated a new ten-coach shuttle train at Battali station to replace one of the long-serving rakes.

Faculties, Institutes and Research

From its single founding faculty, the university grew subject by subject. The Faculty of Arts added Fine Arts in 1970, Philosophy in 1972, Islamic History and Culture and Oriental Languages in 1974, Arabic and Persian in 1977 and Journalism in 1994. Science teaching began with Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics in 1968, followed by Statistics in 1970 and Zoology and Botany in 1973. The Faculty of Social Sciences was founded in 1971, joining Economics — a founding department — with Political Science, Sociology, Public Administration and later Anthropology. A commerce faculty followed in 1971, the ancestor of today's Faculty of Business Administration. A Department of Law opened in 1992 under the law faculty, an engineering faculty dates from 2001, and the newest, the Faculty of Marine Sciences and Fisheries, from 2019. With biological sciences, education and a medical faculty for its affiliated colleges, recent profiles count ten faculties in all. Beyond the hills, more than twenty affiliated colleges and professional institutes — the medical colleges among them — carry the university's degrees across the greater Chittagong region.

Two institutes gave the young university national firsts. Teaching about the sea began in 1971 with a Department of Marine Biology and Oceanography, set up with Canadian technical assistance; in 1983 it became the Institute of Marine Sciences — for decades the country's only institution of its kind, and still its leading centre for marine science and fisheries education. On land, the Institute of Forestry was established in 1976 as the pioneer of forestry education in Bangladesh, becoming the Institute of Forestry and Environmental Sciences in 1996 and training generations of the country's forest officers on a campus that is itself a working landscape of plantations and natural forest.

The scale of the modern university is best taken from its most recent published figures. In January 2026 the national news agency BSS reported 26,678 students, 48 departments in nine faculties, six institutes and five research centres, taught by about 1,010 teachers — counts that vary slightly between sources and years, as institutes and departments are reorganised. The same reporting recorded a research milestone: 615 papers in internationally indexed Scopus journals in 2025, the university's highest annual total, led by chemistry, engineering, pharmacy and the life and environmental sciences.

1971: Occupation and Sacrifice

The university was barely four years old when the Liberation War came, and its youth made it a centre of the nationalist movement. The day after the historic 7 March 1971 speech in Dhaka, teachers and students formed a Chittagong University Sangram Parishad — an action council for the coming struggle — under the chairmanship of Vice-Chancellor Mallick himself, to organise resistance against a possible Pakistani attack. On 24 March the Alumni Association staged a mass musical programme for independence at the central field.

Two days later, on 26 March, Pakistani forces occupied the campus and turned it into a base, holding it for nine months. Freedom fighters raided the campus on 14 December 1971, and it was finally freed on 25 December, nine days after the surrender in Dhaka. Sixteen members of the university family — one teacher, twelve students and three officers and employees — were martyred during the war, according to the university archives. The only teacher among them was Avani Mohan Dutta, a part-time lecturer in philosophy who had fed freedom fighters and passed them information, killed on 8 May 1971. The first martyr was Abdur Rab, a history student and general secretary of the central students' union, who had been escorting recruits across the border for training. Mohammad Hossain, a chainman in the engineering office, died as a naval commando on 16 May 1971 while mining a Pakistani ship in the Karnaphuli River, and received the gallantry award Bir Protik — the university's only recipient. A memorial at the Zero Point entrance, erected in 2009, keeps their names before every entering student.

Two Professors

Two members of its economics and mathematics faculties carried the university's name far beyond Bangladesh. Muhammad Yunus, born in Chittagong, joined the Department of Economics in 1972, fresh from the new country's Planning Commission, later headed the department and became professor in 1975, remaining until 1989. The poverty he saw around the campus during the 1974 famine pushed him from theory into the field: in Jobra, the village adjoining the campus, he began the small loans to poor women that grew into the Grameen Bank and, in 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize he shared with it. He has described the bank as born in the university's Economics Department, and in May 2025 Muhammad Yunus returned to receive an honorary Doctor of Literature at the university's fifth convocation.

In mathematics, Jamal Nazrul Islam was a cosmologist of world standing — a Cambridge contemporary of Stephen Hawking, author of The Ultimate Fate of the Universe — who gave up secure posts in Britain and America to come home. He joined the university as professor of mathematics in 1984 and in 1989 founded the Research Centre for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, inaugurated by Nobel laureate Abdus Salam, which he directed until his death in 2013. The centre now bears his name, and in July 2026 construction began on a six-storey annex for it, funded by the University Grants Commission — a late but concrete investment in the institution he built. Islam, made professor emeritus in 2006 and honoured with the Ekushey Padak in 2000, was posthumously awarded the Independence Award in 2025.

The University at Sixty

On 18 November 2026 the University of Chittagong marks its Diamond Jubilee — sixty years since the opening ceremony in the Hathazari hills. Preparations through the autumn of 2026 were led by Vice-Chancellor Professor Dr Mohammad Al-Forkan, who also, earlier in the year, flagged off the newest shuttle train: a neat emblem of a university whose oldest traditions and newest investments are the same things — a green hill campus, a train full of students, and a region's long insistence on a university of its own. What began with 200 students, seven teachers and one typewriter in a borrowed house is now a community of some 27,000 students whose research output, institutes and alumni reach across Bangladesh and well beyond it.