Bangladesh’s public universities must confront a difficult inheritance. For years, ruling-party student fronts turned residential halls into spaces of surveillance, discipline and fear. Between 2009 and 2024, this system worked most powerfully through the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL) — the student wing of the Bangladesh Awami League, founded by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on January 4, 1948. In that world, visible Muslim piety could become politica…