University of Rajshahi: History, Motihar Campus and Student Life

The University of Rajshahi is the second-oldest university in Bangladesh and the largest seat of higher learning in the country's north. Founded in 1953 on what was then the edge of a quiet district town, it now spreads across 753 acres of green land at Motihar, east of Rajshahi city and close to the Padma River. Its history is bound up with the making of Bangladesh itself: one of its teachers, Dr Shamsuzzoha, became the first martyred intellectual of the 1969 mass upsurge, and its campus carries the graves and memorials of 1971. Today the university teaches more than 30,000 students in 59 departments, and remains the academic centre of gravity for the whole Barind region.

Founding: a university for the north

The idea of a university for northern Bengal is older than Pakistan. In 1917 the Sadler Commission, appointed to review university education in Bengal, recommended a university that could serve students of the northern and southern districts, but the report was shelved and nothing came of it for more than three decades. After 1947 the University of Dhaka stood alone in East Pakistan, and the demand for a second university in the north gathered force, championed locally by figures such as the lawyer and legislator Madar Bakhsh.

The East Pakistan Provincial Assembly passed the Rajshahi University Act — East Bengal Act XV of 1953 — on 31 March 1953, and the university formally came into being on 6 July 1953. Its first vice-chancellor was Dr Itrat Hossain Zuberi, the principal of Rajshahi College, who worked with Madar Bakhsh to draw up the new institution's framework.

The beginnings were modest. In the 1953–54 session the university had 161 students — only five of them women — and 20 teachers, teaching six subjects: Bengali, English, History, Law, Philosophy and Economics. There was no campus of its own. Classes were held at Rajshahi College, and the administration worked from the Bara Kuthi, an eighteenth-century Dutch trading house on the Padma. At the outset, colleges across the northern and southern regions were affiliated to the new university, making it an examining and affiliating body for a vast area as well as a teaching institution.

The Motihar campus

Land was acquired at Motihar, then open countryside east of the town, and between 1961 and 1964 the university moved to its permanent home. The campus that grew there is now one of the most admired in Bangladesh: 753 acres of lawns, lakes and tree-lined avenues, of which the most famous is Paris Road, a long straight avenue shaded by tall trees that has become the university's visual signature.

The campus sits on the southern edge of the Barind, the dry Pleistocene terrace that defines the geography of the Rajshahi region, yet inside the boundary the land is kept green and park-like, a deliberate contrast to the city a few kilometres west. The Padma flows just to the south. The university's own description puts Motihar about seven kilometres east of the Rajshahi city centre — close enough for the city to be its service town, far enough for the campus to run as a self-contained world of halls, playing fields, a stadium, a central library, mosques, markets and its own railway station.

1969: Dr Shamsuzzoha and the mass upsurge

Rajshahi University's place in national memory was fixed in February 1969, during the mass upsurge against the Ayub Khan regime. The movement in Rajshahi ignited after the killing in custody of Sergeant Zahurul Haque, an accused in the Agartala Conspiracy Case. On 18 February 1969, with Section 144 in force banning gatherings, students prepared to march out of the campus towards the town, and Pakistani troops positioned themselves at the main gate.

Dr Syed Mohammad Shamsuzzoha, a reader in chemistry and the university's proctor, placed himself between the soldiers and his students and pleaded with the officers not to fire — he is remembered for the words that before any bullet struck a student, it would have to strike him. He was shot and then bayoneted, and died at Rajshahi Medical College Hospital. Dr Shamsuzzoha is widely regarded as the first intellectual martyred in the democratic movement, and his death poured fuel on the upsurge that within weeks forced Ayub Khan from power. The university still observes 18 February as Teachers' Day, known on campus as Zoha Day, and his grave lies in front of the administration building. In 2008 the state awarded him the Independence Award posthumously.

The Liberation War and after

When the Liberation War came in 1971, the university's teachers and students joined the resistance, and the campus — occupied and scarred by the fighting — keeps the evidence still: a mass grave, a martyrs' memorial archive, and the Shabash Bangladesh sculpture, whose figures trace the movement years from 1952 to 1971. Three more teachers were martyred in the war: Habibur Rahman of mathematics, Sukharanjan Samaddar of Sanskrit and Mir Abdul Qayyum of psychology. Their names live on in the Shaheed Habibur Rahman Hall and the Shaheed Sukharanjan Samaddar Teacher-Student Centre.

After independence the university was re-founded in law as well as in fact. The Rajshahi University Act 1973, passed on 25 September 1973, replaced the 1953 Act and gave Rajshahi a degree of statutory autonomy unusual among Bangladeshi universities — a status it shares with only a handful of older institutions. Professor Khan Sarwar Murshid, who became vice-chancellor in February 1972, led the university through its first post-war years.

The university today: structure and scale

The modern University of Rajshahi is a comprehensive public research university. Its 59 departments are organised into twelve faculties — Arts, Law, Science, Social Sciences, Business Studies, Engineering, Agriculture, Biological Sciences, Geosciences, Fisheries, Veterinary and Animal Sciences, and Fine Arts — covering everything from Sanskrit and folklore to fisheries and veterinary medicine, a breadth that reflects its role as the university of an agricultural region. Six institutes sit alongside the faculties, among them the Institute of Business Administration and the Institute of Education and Research, which run their own degree programmes.

Research is anchored by the Institute of Bangladesh Studies, founded in January 1974 as the first institute of its kind in the country. The IBS admits MPhil and PhD researchers from across the disciplines to work on the history, society, economy and culture of Bangladesh, and publishes a long-running journal. The Institute of Biological Sciences and the Institute of Environmental Science support laboratory and field research, the latter well placed in a region where water scarcity on the Barind is a defining research problem.

The university's own figures, published on its website, put its strength at more than 1,200 faculty members and more than 30,000 students. Seventeen residential halls — eleven for men and six for women — house a large share of the student body, and hall life, with its own unions, dining halls and sports, remains the centre of the Rajshahi student experience. The university is led by a vice-chancellor appointed under the 1973 Act; since March 2026 the post has been held by Professor Dr Md. Faridul Islam, a professor of marketing.

Affiliation, once a defining function, has narrowed over time. In 1992 the country's degree colleges passed to the newly created National University, ending Rajshahi's role as the affiliating university for the north and south. The wheel turned part-way back in April 2024, when four of the city's government colleges — Rajshahi College, where the university's first classes were held, along with Rajshahi Government City College, Rajshahi Government Women's College and Rajshahi New Government Degree College — were affiliated to the university.

Student life and the road to Motihar

Rajshahi is a residential university in a way few Bangladeshi institutions still are. Most students live in or around the campus, and the day runs on campus rhythms: classes in the faculty buildings along Paris Road, adda at the transport market and Shaheb Bazar in the evening, and the long walk or rickshaw ride between hall and department. The university runs its own bus fleet on routes across the city, with Shaheb Bazar — the commercial heart of Rajshahi — as the main interchange for students living in town.

The railway runs along the campus edge, and for decades Rajshahi University station was a stop in name only: intercity trains passed through without halting, and students travelled into the main city station instead. After student protests in July 2026 — including a blockade of the line — railway authorities agreed to stoppages, and from 24 October 2026 the Titumir Express and the Sagardari Express began scheduled halts at the university station, a change students had demanded for nearly thirty years.

Student politics, long a force on this campus, has re-entered formal channels. Elections to the Rajshahi University Central Students' Union (RUCSU) were held on 16 October 2025 for the first time in 35 years. The Islami Chhatra Shibir-backed panel won 20 of the 23 central posts, with Mostakur Rahman Zahid elected vice-president, while the general secretary's post went to Salahuddin Ammar of a rival panel — an outcome that made the revived union an immediate player in campus affairs.

The university's alumni reach across Bangladeshi public life and letters. The novelist Selina Hossain took her bachelor's and master's degrees in Bengali here in 1967 and 1968, before writing works such as Hangor Nodi Grenade; the university awarded her an honorary D.Litt at its tenth convocation in 2018. The same convocation honoured Hasan Azizul Huq, the master of the Bengali short story, who had taken his postgraduate degree at Rajshahi in 1960 and then taught philosophy on the campus for three decades, from 1973 to 2004.

Challenges

Growth has brought strain. Accommodation is the sharpest pressure: at the orientation for new students in August 2026, Vice-Chancellor Faridul Islam spoke publicly of an acute shortage of hall seats and said the university was in discussion with the University Grants Commission about it — an acknowledgement, from the top, that residential capacity has not kept pace with enrolment. Transport, too, has repeatedly tested the administration, from overcrowded university buses on the city routes to the long campaign for trains to stop at the campus station.

Politics remains the university's other chronic question. The December 2025 episode in which students locked the offices of six deans over alleged partisan affiliation — ending in the deans' removal — showed how quickly factional disputes can reach into academic administration. A year after RUCSU's revival, reporting in October and November 2026 described fresh uncertainty: the elected committee's one-year term had expired with no schedule announced for the next election, and union leaders warned publicly that without regular polls the campus could slide back to the practices the revival was meant to end. How the university manages that tension — between an activist campus tradition it rightly celebrates in its history and the stable academic calendar its students also need — will shape Rajshahi's next decade as surely as any building programme.

Seven decades on, the university that began with 161 students in borrowed rooms at Rajshahi College remains what its founders intended: the intellectual capital of northern Bangladesh, a campus where the country's history is not only taught but physically present — in a grave by the administration building, in memorials among the trees, and in a student body that still expects its university to matter beyond its gates.