The Institution Before the Institution

The easiest way to describe Halls is as an education project. That description is accurate, but it misses the part that makes the organisation unusual.

Halls Academy is only one initiative within Halls. The larger organisation is intended to contain local communities, with education alongside health care, community support, responsible governance and local development. A hall is the local unit. The academy can operate inside it, as other initiatives can. The institution is therefore being designed from the community outward, rather than from a school downward.

That distinction explains more about Halls than its name does.

Hamid Yasir's interest in this kind of structure began before Halls had a building. He grew up in Chittagong and did not follow the conventional secondary-school route. As a teenager, he wrote to universities and colleges asking whether he could study at the college level without first obtaining the usual government-issued secondary credential. Arizona State University eventually gave him a route to do so.

The experience seems to have left him with a particular view of institutions. Access did not have to depend entirely on age, sequence or the credentials normally used to determine who was ready. A person could demonstrate what he could do and be given room to proceed.

His later experience abroad gave him a different set of examples. At Oxford, he encountered colleges that maintained their own communities and internal life while belonging to a larger university. At McGill, he studied the Canadian federal system and saw a different version of the same broad problem: how authority can be divided without dissolving the larger institution.

Those experiences eventually became part of the vocabulary with which he described Halls.

“You keep coming back to autonomy,” I said. “What does autonomy actually mean to you?”

“It starts with the person,” he said. “People should have some control over the conditions of their own lives. Then you ask how communities can have that same capacity.”

That answer explains why a hall is more important to the structure than a campus.

A campus is principally a place. A hall, as Yasir uses the word, is a community with an institutional identity. It can have its own people, activities and local character while remaining part of Halls as a whole. The arrangement borrows something from the collegiate tradition he encountered at Oxford, but Yasir's purpose is broader. The hall is meant to be a practical unit of community life.

This also explains why Halls Academy does not sit at the top of the structure.

Education is important to Yasir, but it is not the entire proposition. A child does not live at school. A family does not exist only as a collection of students. If an institution is meant to serve a community, Yasir's argument is that it should have some capacity to deal with the rest of that community as well.

That is a considerably more ambitious proposition than opening a school.

It also helps explain the choice of Sitalpur.

Yasir could have started in central Chittagong, where there are more people and greater commercial opportunity. Instead, he opened Laila Ahmed Halls in his home area. When I asked why, he did not frame the decision as a market calculation.

“Why start there?” I asked. “You could probably make more money in the city.”

“The city already has resources,” he said. “There are schools, hospitals, businesses and services. I want to see what happens when you take those things to communities that have less access to them.”

He has argued that governments tend to concentrate resources around large metropolitan areas and that communities outside those centres are often left to make do with less. Whether that assessment holds in every case is a separate question. What matters for Halls is that it has shaped where the organisation chose to begin.

There is another part of Yasir's thinking that makes the decision easier to understand.

He grew up immersed in Western popular culture. American television was part of his childhood: Cartoon Network, Disney, HBO, National Geographic and Discovery. Later he read about the American civil-rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and the contradictions between the principles proclaimed by Western democracies and the experiences of the people living within them.

The language of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” therefore interested him in a particular way. He did not encounter it simply as a slogan to admire. He became interested in the circumstances that made those words meaningful, and in the distance that could exist between an institution's stated principles and people's actual lives.

“You're very influenced by the West,” I said. “Did that affect the way you think about society?”

“Of course,” he said. “I grew up watching American television. I read American history. I read about civil rights. But I was also reading about the contradictions. You can't look at the ideals without looking at the reality.”

He describes himself as cosmopolitan, with an interest in the human population as a whole rather than in one nationality. At the same time, he places considerable weight on personal sovereignty and autonomy. Those ideas can sit together if the basic unit of political and social life is the individual and the community rather than the state.

That is, in effect, the experiment Halls is attempting.

The organisation begins with a person, places that person inside a local community, gives the community some degree of institutional identity, and then connects those communities through a larger organisation. The academy provides an educational framework. Other initiatives address other parts of community life. The structure is intended to remain connected without making every local decision at the centre.

The idea has precedents. Federal governments divide authority between levels. Universities divide authority between central administrations and colleges or faculties. Cooperative organisations allow local units to share infrastructure while retaining some independence.

Halls is borrowing from these arrangements without being identical to any of them.

That may be the most revealing part of the project. Yasir is not trying to reproduce Oxford in Chittagong, nor Canada in miniature. He is taking institutional features he encountered elsewhere and asking what happens when they are applied to a much smaller community.

The question then becomes practical.

How much authority should a hall have? Which decisions belong to the local community? Which standards must remain common across Halls? How are disputes resolved? Who can challenge the central organisation? What happens when a local hall wants something the wider institution does not?

Those questions are not flaws in the concept. They are part of the concept. Any system that distributes authority has to decide where that authority begins and ends.

There is a further complication in Halls because Yasir himself is so closely associated with its design. The organisation grew out of his education, his political experience and his reading of other institutions. That gives the project a coherent origin, but it also creates a question of succession.

An institution becomes durable when its rules continue to work after the person who designed them is no longer making every important decision. Halls will eventually have to demonstrate that its structure can produce that kind of continuity.

For now, the organisation is still close to its founder and its first community.

That makes Sitalpur particularly useful as a place to watch what happens next. The theory has a building. The building has people. The people will have ordinary needs, disagreements, costs, schedules and expectations. A philosophy of autonomy eventually has to decide who gets to approve a budget. A theory of community eventually has to decide how a complaint is handled. An educational model eventually has to decide what happens when a student does not fit the expected path.

Those are mundane questions. They are also where institutions reveal what they really are.

Yasir spent his early life looking for institutions that would give him room to proceed on his own terms. He later studied institutions that had already worked out ways of combining local identity with a larger structure. Halls appears to be his attempt to put those lessons into one organisation.

Its first test is therefore taking place in a very specific place.

Laila Ahmed Halls opened in Sitalpur, in the part of Chittagong where Yasir grew up. The larger system can wait. For the moment, the hall is where the idea has to operate.