Part-time teaching and study leave: Concerns of UGC

Of recent, the University Grants Commission (UGC) of Bangladesh has released some reports highlighting some important issues regarding higher education situation of the country which deserves appreciation. In its annual report of 2013, it has  revealed that some public university teachers engaged in part-time teaching in one or more private universities spend much more time there than in their own universities. Of course, there is no specific guideline on how much time a public university teacher can spend as a part-time teacher in any other university or educational institution. So, an initiative for formulating and implementing some specific guidelines on the teachers' duty and overall conduct is needed.
UGC Chairman Prof AK Azad Chowdhury said his Commission will formulate the guidelines to specify how much time a teacher should spend in his own university and in his part-time engagement in other educational institutions, especially private universities. The guidelines must be formulated in consultation with authorities of the public universities or else, both the public and the private universities would be affected.
The commission said the quality of public university teachers is very satisfactory and most of them are sincere and play a significant role in national development. But there is an allegation against a section of the public university teachers that they are reluctant about their duties in their own universities. Many teachers remain absent in their classes without issuing any prior notice to the students. Even they hardly spend the required time in practical classes.
Although all the public universities have their own rules over how many hours a teacher should spend in the class a week, the rules are not implemented properly. The UGC thinks there should also be a specific rule about how much time a teacher should pass in the workplace of research, administrative work, interacting with students other than taking 30-32 classes a year.
Another true but alarming factor has come out through their report that the quality of the graduate-level students in the educational institutions affiliated with National University (NU) of Bangladesh was not satisfactory. Around 48 percent of the total students in the honours level in the country are enrolled in such institutions. Though NU has the responsibility to supervise academic activities of the government and private colleges, it is not doing the task properly. Besides, NU was not playing any role in the recruitment and transfer of teachers, and it has become a difficult task for the university to supervise more than 2,000 colleges in different regions with strength of collective  students  of more than 1.3 million.
The UGC said it was a very difficult task for NU to solely monitor all the colleges located in different regions due to inadequate infrastructure and human resources.
Since the inception in 1992, NU has been facing myriad of problems, including inadequate human resources and session jams resulting in the failure of imparting quality education to students. Session jams in NU have been serious and no effective steps were taken to resolve the issue. The commission, however, welcomed NU's plan to set up regional centres in seven divisional cities to monitor academic activities of the colleges in their respective regions. The UGC expressed hope that the initiative would bring back discipline in academic activities in the educational institutions affiliated with National University. The commission was also mulling to upgrade the regional centres to autonomous universities in phases by recruiting teachers and human resources for research work for enriching the quality of education. Besides, it was not possible to set up post-graduate universities overnight in the divisional level because it was time-consuming and required huge investment.
In this situation the colleges under NU can be handed over to the older and bigger universities in the divisional levels as an interim measure. But the UGC emphasised tight supervision of the activities of the affiliated institutions to achieve the expected quality of education. The report recommended to the government to make NU an autonomous post-graduate educational institutions where only Masters of Science and Doctor of Philosophy level academic activities should continue. Only colleges in the Dhaka division could be affiliated with NU.
The regulatory body also proposed that post-graduate level universities can be established in the six other divisional cities and the graduate level colleges can be affiliated with the respective universities. In 2009, the government had formed a high powered committee to prepare necessary recommendations for NU which had concluded that the large number of colleges under NU was a major constraint on the ways to ensure quality education. Unfortunately, the authorities concerned had failed to implement the proposals, including decentralisation, in the past four years. For the sake of maintaining quality of NU, the recommendations of the committee should be taken into consideration.
UGC has also detected that the academic activities in the country's public universities are hamstrung by serious problems, including session jam, as a result of agitations and protests in connection with different demands by irate teachers as well as student politics and campus violence.  20.50 percent of the teachers in 32 public universities, barring National University (NU) and Bangladesh Open University (BOU) went on leave in 2013. Some 20 percent of 11, 505 teachers under NU and BOU were on leave. Though there were 11,323 teachers in the 32 public universities, in 2013, only 9,004 teachers were on duty, while the rest of the teachers went on different vacations. At total of 1,657 teachers were on leave throughout the year while 140 were on lien, 88 were on leave without salaries, 15 teachers were on leave without permission and 419 contractual teachers were on leave in 2013.The number of teachers absent through the years were 273 from DU, 121 from RU, 115, from Agricultural University,  161 from BUET, 109 from Chittagong University, 103 from JU, 131 from SUST, 118 from Khulna University, 98 from Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University, 47 from Hajji Danesh University of Science and Technology and 18 from Islamic  University. Currently 260 teachers out of 1850 teachers from Dhaka University, 130 out of 634 from Jahangrinagar University, 159 from Rajshahi University, 74 teachers out of 503 from Jagannath University are on leave.
Generally in every academic year classes are held for 30 to 32 weeks round the year while the rest of the time comprises vacation. According to different university sources, many public university teachers go on leave to obtain higher education and PhD degrees from various universities abroad. But they get involved in various jobs in those countries after obtaining their  degrees and feel reluctant to come back home as they get more benefits there than in Bangladesh.
The annual report of UGC listed that there were 3,969 PhD holders, 975 teachers possessed other degrees and 6,369 were without any higher degrees in the 32 universities. The total number of teachers with PhD and other higher degrees was 4,954 which meant only 44 percent teachers had higher degrees  in 2013. In 2012 there were 4,980 teachers with PhD and other  higher degrees implying  that only 14 more such teachers in 2013, though the number of students  increased by about two lakh in 2013.  
We must think of increasing the number of teachers in the universities with the increasing number of pupils getting enrolled and find out the causes why the teachers  going abroad for higher education show reluctance to come to the country. We should give them incentives to come back to the country and give them due honour as scholars what they enjoy outside the country but inside the country they become the victims of politics.
The teachers who are in politics and are away from books and research are honoured and rewarded whereas the real scholars are neglected. This issue needs to be looked into seriously.

The writer is Programme Manager at BRAC Education Program and Vice-President of Bangladesh English Language Teachers Association (BELTA),
email: [email protected]