Possible solution for university problem

October 1, 2012, 7:22 pm , The Island


By Dr. Manodha Gamage

Months have passed by, yet a solution seems to be distant. Since I have been lecturing/teaching at various universities and institutions local as well as overseas, over the last two decades, I thought of sharing some of my thoughts on some of the issues of the lecturers of the national universities in Sri Lanka. As of now I am a senior lecturer at visiting capacity both in leading national and private engineering universities in Sri Lanka. My field of expertise is Telecommunications Engineering and ICT. Therefore most of the ideas I express here are more relevant to these technical fields.

According to my experience as an undergraduate at the University of Moratuwa and as a Senior Lecturer, I would say that the best of the lecturers are those who have academic qualification and working experience in the relevant industries. Therefore, when recruiting the senior lecturers to the national universities, it is not only the PhD that matters but also the ability to teach, the working experience and exposure in the relevant industry. Just as the engineering students undergo industrial training during their undergraduate courses, the university lecturers and professors from time to time should take breaks from their teaching and work in the industry for a few months.

Even though the general impression is that the best scholars in an engineering batch would decide to do PhDs and stay in the university as lecturers, the reality is slightly different to that. This is mainly due to the mismatch of the salary structures in the industry compared to the universities. In the Telecommunication industry, up until recent years, fresh engineers were paid at least more than double the salary of a fresh graduate joining the university staff as a probationary lecturer. This gap would rapidly increase as they accumulate more experiences. This is a huge drawback to attract the best quality lecturers to the national universities. This gap may not be that high in some fields and may not even exist in certain other fields, such as the arts stream. I must admit that I haven’t done a study in other disciplines and doing such a study is equally important when trying to solve the issues at hand.

If you are to really benefit from the free education, we must try to get the best in each discipline as the lecturers of the universities. The more logical solution to attract the best professionals in each field to the national universities to coach the future generations is to place the salaries of the university lecturers on par with the market salaries of each discipline. In other words it may be necessary to pay a higher salary to a lecturer of a Telecommunications Department of the university, than to a lecturer in the arts faculty, simply because of the attractive alternative demands for good engineering graduates. In simple terms, the university academics in different fields such as Engineering (even in engineering there are many disciplines namely Electronics, Telecommunications, Electrical, Computer Science, Chemical, Material, Civil, Mechanical etc. etc.), Medicine, Accounting and Management, Law, Economics, Physical Sciences, Agriculture etc. etc. could be placed on different salary scales that are comparable with the respective industry. Easier said than done! I know the difficulty of getting the consensus of the academics to such a proposal. Yet my suggestion to make this differentiation is explained below.

Now the FUTA is demanding the government to spend 6% of GDP for education. Rather than criticizing this demand, I would, and I am sure everybody would agree that we need to invest more in education, if we have any goals set for our country to develop faster in the future. Also most people criticize the FUTA that they don’t propose any project if the government decides to invest more in the future. My suggestion is that we should seriously think of building state of the art R&D Centers in Sri Lanka. Definitely we should do more research in the fields of Telecommunications, ICT etc. and there must be many other suitable and relevant disciplines to do further research and develop new technologies and methodologies useful to Sri Lanka. The initial step is to appoint a committee mainly comprising the university academics and industry experts to decide on these relevant disciplines. Those are the disciplines that have higher demand for the undergraduates coming out of the university system each year.

Once those disciplines are identified, we should decide the disciplines that should be combined together to accommodate in a single R&D Center. The factors such as the relationships of the disciplines, the present locations of the universities that possess the expertise in each discipline, the investment available etc. would determine the number of R&D centers to be built and their locations.

Once these R&D centers are built, any academic can work in them, while they continue to do their lecturing and normal work at the universities. There could be full time researchers in them too. As of now most academics teach in small private institutions (so called affiliated universities) during their spare time as the salaries of the National Universities are not sufficient. But actually the academics should be spending more time on research & development than in teaching. This could be done only if R&D is well recognized in the country and well compensated. If this doesn’t happen sooner than later, the development goals of this country would be merely a dream. Therefore R&D centers are a need of the hour.

At this juncture the strike of the academics is continued mostly because there is no exit window. I think it is high time President Mahinda Rajapaksa intervened to have a discussion with the FUTA as this has become a national issue. A proposal to build R&D Centers would be an attractive offer to FUTA’s demand for more investment in education, and may be committee of academics could be appointed to study further and bring in to carry out a feasibility study. The time-lines also could be decided for the project. In addition to this, the salaries of last 3 months (during the strike period) could be offered to the FUTA members. If this is done this strike could be ended in a win-win situation.