There's Rayalseema University, there's Palamuru University. From Marathwada University, many of my colleagues get PhDs.
All this is to "enhance quality in higher education." --we need more PhDs in our staff in order to get a good grade in the assessment. Every year, 5 or 6 people register and couple of years later get a PhD. We are overflowing with PhDs. They all do 20-24 lectures a week + admin work + work on their research.
There was this recent encounter with an assessment team. You take your students to visit a research facility and have photos as evidence, it does not count as an activity to help students. You need to have letters, feedbacks, reports, budgets and expenditure statements to prove you took 20 kids on a trip to a research lab. Most of the arrangements for our trip were made telephonically and a couple of emails. No formal letter - ergo trip did not happen. However, all that is quite OK-- next time, I will remember to write letters in triplicate; but the comment about research "whatever be the quality" being necessary has really depressed me enormously.
2 comments:
This rather sad. Particularly the practice of awarding PhD at whim by these second-rung universities. But if we try to look at the root-cause of this malaise, the problem is in awarding promotions to faculty members at quite a large number of 2nd tier Engineering colleges based on whether they have a PhD (or are in the process of getting one.)
Most of these colleges would do well to focus on teaching students the basics of their respective discipline well, and equipping them with skills required in the industry.
@wilkerson:Yes. everyone should do what he is best at and this maxim applies to colleges.
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