ULSA to Halls

Halls Academy is a federation of halls, each serving a community with its own students, faculty, and character, all bound to the same rigorous framework and the same academic standards. The academy itself holds no government charter and asks for none. Individual halls carry whatever accreditation their jurisdictions require; the academy carries none. The refusal is deliberate. Hamid Yasir built it, in part, as a structure no single government could reach or repurpose. He had watched an education system built to manage what people were permitted to think.

It is the education arm of a larger body, the Union of Laila Saleh, named for Yasir's grandparents. The Union covers education, health care, responsible governance, and community support. Yasir describes its purpose as self-sufficiency, a society built on positive peace, and the pursuit of happiness. He took the phrase deliberately from the American Declaration of Independence: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Its own description of the whole arrangement is shorter than this sentence: many halls make one academy, one academy serves one union, none left alone.

Yasir arrived at that design the long way, working against a government that spent decades narrowing what could be said or taught in Bangladesh. He was born in Chittagong and never went to a traditional secondary school. The education system he would have entered, under the Hasina regime, ran on memorization and propaganda. Hasina's kakistocracy held people hostage for fifteen years, from 2009 until her ouster in August 2024. It used the Digital Security Act and its successor law to detain and prosecute journalists, academics, and critics. Rights groups and foreign governments accused the security services, including the Rapid Action Battalion, of extrajudicial killings and of running secret detention sites, one later identified by name as Aynaghor, "house of mirrors." A government commission formed after her fall would eventually document enforced disappearances in the thousands. When children his age moved on to secondary schools controlled by that system, Yasir stopped and did not go with them.

In his early teens he wrote instead to universities and colleges around the world, proposing to study at the college level as a tutorial student without a government-issued secondary credential, advancing according to what he could demonstrate rather than his age. A number of universities wrote back, and most of those arrangements broke down over cost or a requirement that he relocate after the terms were settled. Arizona State University made neither demand. It allowed him to prove himself, and he studied the social sciences, the liberal arts, and the structure of federal systems there, earning his high-school equivalency afterward as a byproduct of the coursework rather than a condition set in front of it.

Letters of permission arranged through Dalhousie later let him study, without transferring his primary affiliation, at Oxford, Harvard, the University of Maine, and McGill. Two things he found there he later carried into his own design.

At Oxford, the university was organised through colleges, each with its own students, faculty, and governance, while remaining part of the university and operating within its academic framework. At McGill, in Quebec, he encountered a similar arrangement in government rather than education. Quebec held its own authority over language, culture, and its schools while remaining part of the Canadian federation. The two institutions gave him examples of how local autonomy could exist within a larger system.

The Oxford model also had an older ancestor. Before the modern university existed, some medieval Oxford students lived and studied in halls, under a principal, in communities small enough for members to know one another. St Edmund Hall at Oxford keeps records going back to 1317. It became a full college much later and kept the name it had carried for six centuries.

From this, Yasir drew the distinction that became the basis of his own institution. A campus is a piece of ground. A branch reports to an office elsewhere. A school is defined by its function rather than its scale. A hall is a self-governing community, built to a size a person can actually know, that still belongs to something larger than itself.

The name changed as the idea did. It started as ULSA, short for Union of Laila Saleh Academy. Once the Oxford college model took hold, it became Union Collegiate. Once the medieval hall took hold, it became Union Halls. It settled finally on Halls Academy, the name it carries now.

He began work on a hall in Chittagong in the summer of 2018 upon returning home for a visit. Human rights organisations had spent years documenting the government's use of arrest, surveillance, and disappearance against opposition figures, journalists, and ordinary dissenters. Building an independent institution outside state sanction carried real risk under those conditions, and Yasir left the country. Over the next six years he kept studying and working abroad, moving between Oxford, Harvard, Maine, and McGill, working through law, sustainability, and the liberal arts, while also collaborating with other institutions elsewhere and testing the Union's structure beyond theory.

The break came in the summer of 2024. Student-led protests, beginning over a government hiring quota, spread into a nationwide uprising against the government itself. Security forces killed hundreds of protesters trying to put it down. As many students weighed the risk of boycotting that year's Higher Secondary Certificate examinations under the crackdown, Union Collegiate stood with them, waiving all fees for its own equivalent programme for students affected by the boycott. Hasina fled to India on August 5, 2024, ending her rule.

Yasir returned to Chittagong that year and formally opened the doors of Laila Ahmed Halls, the Union's own arm in the district, built to hold multiple halls for education, health care, lifestyle improvement, and overall community development. The plural name reflects the structure inside it: the same four parts of the Union's mandate, brought to the scale of a single district, in the place where Yasir was born, under his direct management for the first time.