Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on March 25, 2019 - March 31, 2019

In recent years, Malaysian universities have come under public scrutiny with references to their mediocrity, the lack of academic culture and intellectual ambience on the campuses, and the politicisation and racialisation of local tertiary education. These problems suggest widespread unhappiness at the universities.

Academics who work in these institutions are conscious of the low morale on the campuses. In fact, it can be stated that there is, among academics and students, particularly those doing their master’s and PhD, a growing sense of disillusion with university life, and a deepening frustration with the state of tertiary education.

Part of the reason for the lack of academic culture is the level of bureaucratisation the universities suffer from. This is such that it leaves academics unable to deal with the various problems that afflict university education. The academic staff has little direction and control over the policies and practices of the universities. Malaysian universities have become more centralised and hierarchical. The emphasis on top-down planning has meant reduced autonomy at the department level.

The academics have generally acquiesced to this state of affairs. As a result, they are not able to influence university policies and cannot play a crucial role in bringing about positive change that would eventually create a more academic atmosphere on the campuses and boost morale in the process.

Let me provide two examples of problems on our campuses that are the cause of low morale, problems that need rectification but which persist, nevertheless, due to the inability of administrators to identify them as problems and the reluctance of the academic staff to push for change.

One issue is clocking in. Academic staff, that is lecturers, senior lecturers, associate professors and full professors are expected to clock in upon arrival at their offices. A clocking-in system allows the employer to monitor the attendance of employees by providing an indisputable record of when the employee started and ended the workday. It is incredible, however, that university lecturers are required to clock in. Apart from the fact that this practice is practically unheard-of in the hundreds of leading universities in the world, it is tantamount to treating academic staff with a level of mistrust that is unbecoming of university administrators.

The requirement to clock in creates in the university a working atmosphere based on objective verification or proof rather than trust in the academic staff. It has been noted that such objective proof may be required in workplaces where there is no personal relationship between the employer and employees. In an organisation such as a university, however, close relations are supposed to be formed, not only between the academic staff and students but also among the various levels and departments of the university.

The requirement of clocking in obstructs the process of creating trust and goodwill, particularly between the academic staff and the university administration. For examples, professors who are supposed to be creative and independent thinkers must be thinking that the university administrators lack trust in them and assume that they (the professors) are out to short-change the university in terms of the hours they put in. In other words, the professors are not being accorded the status that is due to them as the scholars they are. The university is not a factory and should not be treated as such. In Malaysia Baru, the practice of clocking in for academic staff should immediately cease.

Another issue that is causing low morale among some academic staff and many graduate students is the practice of the co-authorship of scientific papers. Here, I am referring to social sciences and humanities where the practice is for thesis supervisors to put their names on articles for publication that were solely written by their students. This is extremely unethical but widespread in Malaysian universities. It is tantamount to exploitation of graduate students.

In the leading universities of the world, the supervisor is co-author with the student only if he or she supported the supervisee by being involved in aspects of the research or by writing parts of the paper. However, if the supervisor’s role is strictly that — merely giving advice and suggestions — then he should be acknowledged in that capacity rather than as co-author.

In some Malaysian universities, graduate students are often required to include the names of their supervisors as co-authors even when the supervisors had not contributed to the writing of the article. In this way, academics who have many graduate supervisees can increase the number of articles attributed to them without actually doing the work.

Monash University’s authorship policy comes to mind: “To be named an author, a researcher must have made a substantial scholarly contribution to the work and be able to take responsibility for at least that part of the work they contributed. While attribution of authorship depends to some extent on the discipline, in all cases, authorship must be based on substantial contributions in a combination of: conception and design of the project; analysis and interpretation of research data; drafting significant parts of the work or critically revising it so as to contribute to the interpretation.”

The document goes on to refer to unacceptable inclusions of authorship: “The following activities do not by themselves constitute a claim to authorship without substantial intellectual contribution to the work: being head of department, holding other positions of authority, or personal friendship with the authors; providing a routine technical contribution; providing routine assistance on some aspects of the project; acquisition of funding; general supervision of the research team; providing data that has already been published or materials obtained from third parties (including the routine collation and provision of research source material).”

The practice of naming their supervisors as co-authors when they had not contributed to the writing of the articles has a negative effect on students. It deprives them of producing single-authored papers that would make them more marketable in the eyes of university selection committees. The practice is also unethical because it credits them with publications that are not of their doing. Ultimately, the practice is alienating for students and those supervisors who take an ethical stance on these matters and abstain from such practices, but who are surrounded by free-riding staff who benefit from students’ work.

Clocking-in and co-authorship are just two practices that are creating low morale at our universities. These practices can be easily stopped, which will go a long way towards restoring trust and improving the academic climate of the universities.


Syed Farid Alatas is professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore

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