Decades of neo-liberal restructuring of higher education in Bangladesh forged the nature of education, research, and scholarship into increasingly market-oriented enterprises strikingly different than the nation-building projects as imagined in the national movements. The higher education sector expanded rapidly at an unprecedented scale as the number of universities went up to 53 public, 107 private, and 3 international universities with 1 million students compared to the only 5 public universities that existed in the 1970s. The question of nation-building vs. providing human resources was contested throughout the regimes after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. After the demise of the dictatorship in the early 1990s, hope for the universities as powerful transformative institutions, autonomous from Government, was brightened up, and the vision for academia as a harbor for free and critical thought, truth-seeking research, and discovery and innovation needed for the nation-state as well as producing high-skilled human resource was articulated by the leading educators. Education, as a vehicle for equality and liberating projects, was sought by academics engaging with the education philosophers (Freire, P: 1979). Notwithstanding, this light has been gradually dimmed and compromised as the democracy itself turned into autocracy in a hybrid regime under the current government that throttles critical views and any form of dissents by legal and extra-legal, extra-judicial measures including the infamous draconian Digital Security Act. Strategies and tactics of governmentality for surveillance, control, and regulating the oppositional views fail to uphold the constitutional obligation of safeguarding academic freedom corresponds Article 39. In this paper, I investigate the deteriorating situation of academic freedom, cases arbitrary arrests and loss of jobs for critical voices against administrative policies and pervading corruption using the case study method under an anthropological framework.