As per the following article, Over 50% of IIT Professors are said to be performing below par and steps are being planned to "pinpoint" under-performers.
My response:
Yes, professors who don't take their job seriously have to be penalized.
But solving this problem more completely will take a deeper analysis. Here are a few remarks / suggestions:
1) In a typical university in the west, a professor's role is clearly marked out : come to the department, teach, guide theses / projects, do research, go. No professor becomes a hostel warden and worries about the food being served in messes, trouble shoots hostel indiscipline, etc. They have dorm managers who are hired separately and expected to focus exclusively on dorm management.
We don't have this clarity. Our professors are expected to participate in too many non academic tasks. This needs to change.
2) Way too much time and energy is wasted on "managing students". Important Note: I just said "managing students", not "educating students" : the education part is just fine. What do I mean by this? Here:
I'm an alumnus from IIT Bombay and have also taught at several IITs: IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT (BHU) Varanasi, IIT Goa and IIT (ISM) Dhanbad. Here's a suggestion based on my experience as a student as well as a faculty member:
Carry out sting operations to bring out hostel life at IITs in public view. You
will likely find an abundance of drugs, alcohol, possibly a supply of
women, students lounging around all day in hostels instead of going to classes,
... Start with IITs and then extend to all centrally and state funded
educational institutes and universities. Carry out sting operations regularly
and bring things into public view.
And who has to end up addressing and managing these situations? Of course, the
professors! No professor in any reputed university the world over has to
deal with these things. They teach, guide theses / projects and do research.
Every effort is made for them to stay focused on academics. And the results
show in time.
That's what needs to happen in our country too. Hostel managers need to be hired separately and a large part of their job mandate needs to be ensuring hostel discipline.
Professors need to be left alone to teach, guide theses / projects and do
research. That's it.
3) Go one step further: Put in an RTI for documents such as B. Tech. Project Reports and put them on the web for all to see. Overnight, the myth of "Illustrious Brilliant IIT Undergraduates" will disappear. It will be over. Overnight. And that will be the best thing to happen for long term corrective action to start.
I know I know: Quite immediately, there will be voices : "Oh, these students
are doing low quality projects because they aren't being guided properly by
their professors.". Do three things: 1) Read Paragraph 3 of Point 2 above again and do
what I'm asking you to do. 2) Dig a bit deeper and get data on how many times
students executing low quality projects met their professors. 3) Get class
attendance data for students and correlate with poor academic performance.
Most people possibly have very little idea of how much time and energy is
wasted in responding to these factors.
4) Once the above is sorted out : Compare things like funding, research space, quality of PhD students (yes, I know there are exceptions - and maybe you are one! I'm only talking about overall trends) and availability of post docs with excellent universities globally. A lot of "research productivity" is linked to these factors.
As I said at the start of the post, yes : professors who don't take their job seriously need to be penalized. But solving the problem more completely will need a deeper analysis.
Do the above four and I anticipate that a lot else that also needs to be corrected will start becoming clear.
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