Wannabe Uni Academic

In today's busy world and high expectation at the workplace, with demands from research and academic deans, university lecturers are in a dilemma. They are now torn between which track to follow and excel, to become a 'professor of teaching'.

In medical schools, clinicians have become clinical lecturers at the university. Clinical lecturers teach and some do clinic. A large portion teach a topic or two, a class or two, without attending any clinic. They have moved to non clinical department and found a comfort zone where they do not have to do clinic.

Clinical lecturers who have MBBS can now choose to enter a discipline and find themselves an easy life without having to do clinic and yet be highly regarded as the hardworking clinical lecturers who do 50% teaching, 50% research and 50% clinical. They work 150%, 50% more than the lousy lazy clnical lecturers.

The lazy clinical lecturers are a liability (habis beras saja). They are paid a critical allowance when in fact they don't do clinic at all. They also get a teaching allowance even when they try their best to escape from having to do any teaching, even clinical problem-based learning (PBL) sessions. So what is the point of having and breeding these lazy, useless, clinical lecturers?

Lecturers give a lot of excuses when it comes to assessing their worth. What do we assess them for? How should we assess lecturers at the university?

The Research University status accorded to local universities upset the entire balance and running when they are now exepected to churn out research publications. Teaching is ingnored and the university produced unqualified useless graduates who cannot do anything more than copy and paste. The graduates are victims of the university system.

So we have a sick deteriorating system at the local univerisities. Nobody can do anything much as nobody listens to lecturers. People expect them to perform without financial support. They now find it hard to obtain research funding and even if they do get funding, it is not sufficient to do any good research.

Everything that should go wrong at the university level has gone wrong. it will take time before everything spills out and parents and students become aware of the actual problems affecting tertiary education. The fact tha we have research and academic as antagonistic forces, we will not benefit and students only stand to lose from the fight.