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Wednesday, Apr 22, 2009
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Database to end faculty “sharing” by colleges

Priscilla Jebaraj

All colleges will be required to submit details of faculty

CHENNAI: Anna University, Chennai, is creating a database of all faculty in its affiliated colleges, in an attempt to curb the problem of colleges “sharing” faculty, according to Vice-Chancellor P. Mannar Jawahar.

From the coming academic year, all colleges will be required to submit details of their faculty to the university’s Centre for Affiliation of Institutions.

The Director of the Centre is sending out letters to the affiliated colleges, mandating the registration of faculty members with the university, said Dr. Jawahar. The Centre will then issue standardised identity cards to all faculty members.

This should help stop the practice of several colleges having the same names on their rolls, he said.

When the university sends teams for inspection, colleges “borrow” faculty members in order to meet the 1:15 norms on faculty-student ratio. The same faculty then appear on the rolls of a different college when another inspection team goes there.

The database will also help to standardise the qualifications of the faculty members. The Centre has formulated guidelines to determine who can be counted as a PhD holder eligible for a professor’s post.

“There are those who register for 6-month PhDs. Is that really worth anything,” asked Dr. Jawahar. On the other hand, there were faculty members who did not hold a PhD degree, but had a decade or more of experience in the industry.

“They may have done very good research there…Some of them may be equivalent to a PhD,” he said.

The number and quality of faculty members are an important part of Anna University’s evaluation of its affiliated colleges, with 45 per cent weightage attached to this category. Considering that a score of just 50 per cent is needed to pass the University’s inspection, any college which meets the faculty requirements would sail through easily.

However, staff at the Centre for Affiliation say that many private college managements are still hesitant to spend on faculty salaries, as it is recurring expenditure. Lack of faculty is the single common factor why eight courses are being disaffiliated by the university for failing both rounds of inspection last year, according to data released under the Right to Information Act.

Among the 25 courses which failed a first inspection before getting their act together in round two, 23 failed to meet the faculty requirements.

The central database of faculty may now help the university get a better grip on the magnitude of the problem.

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