Only a steady and continuing stream of research and publications, in addition to a full teaching load of four to five courses, can ensure a promotionA master’s degree in Bangladesh is equivalent to a Bachelor’s in other countries, where the latter alone is a four-year program with the Master’s being at least another year and a half. So, by comparison, a Bangladeshi master’s is actually a lesser master’s, not really equivalent to what is being offered in other countries. As a consequence, students who earn an MA from Bangladesh and wish to pursue their higher education abroad are required to augment and supplement their MA degrees by doing another master’s before they can proceed to the rest of the graduate work towards PhD. The unfortunate fact is that with such a degree from abroad, Bangladeshi graduates not only find a teaching career at the institutions of higher learning in Bangladesh, but also get promoted to assistant, associate, and full professors, with little or no research publications.Do you even publish?In the West and most other countries around the world, master’s degree holders are hired as lecturers to teach lower level courses, such as academic skills, communication skills, freshman composition, and service courses in proficiency, writing, reading, and grammar. Even the introductory or survey courses are normally assigned to PhD holders. One can hardly expect to have a regular full-time and/or permanent position with a master’s degree alone, which is just enough to land a temporary, adjunct, sessional, or semester-by-semester contract position. In Bangladesh, faculty members with similar qualifications can easily go up the promotion ladder. This practice adversely affects the image and quality of higher education as well as the ambition of the young graduates. At one point, therefore, they lose the courage and strength needed to go through the trying process of completing a Western doctoral program of study, consisting of an exacting series of courses, followed by a gruelling comprehensive exam, and then writing a scholarly dissertation, to be successfully defended before a probing committee. In the outside world, the job market is very tight and competitive -- so much so that not just the master’s but also the PhDs consider themselves extremely lucky to be able to find a full-time position at a college or university. Everybody knows that the minimum qualification required to be eligible to apply for an entry-level assistant professor position in the West and Asian developed countries is a PhD with a number of publications. Only a steady and continuing stream of research and publications, in addition to a full teaching load of four to five courses, can ensure a promotion, including the status of being tenured, permanent, or substantive. Competition has, all along, been so tough that even for an assistant professor position, a candidate with a PhD needs to have an impressive CV with a good number of publications and conference presentations, which, by contrast, may be considered sufficient for promotion to full professor in Bangladesh. It is therefore necessary that the Bangladesh government comes up with clearly defined policies and principles regulating the academic career and promotion of Master’s degree holders.Jalal Uddin Khan holds a PhD from NYU, New York, and currently teaches in the Middle East.
There are many factors responsible for the low quality of education in Bangladesh, both at the secondary and the higher level.
Among them are the cancer of exam question leaks, dependence on expensive and lucrative private tuition rather than (thin and light) direct classroom instruction, the establishment of an evil network of connections between teachers, students, parents, and coaching centres, politically motivated and liberally graded high percentage of pass, inefficient, and unqualified teachers hired, both at the school and college/university levels, teachers not teaching their classes regularly during the academic calendar, the list goes on.
Exceptions aside, the weak, dull, insipid, lacklustre, and miserable academic backgrounds of the presidents, vice-chancellors, and members of the parliament and their even more terrible, disfigured and misshapen speech accents, full of substandard local dialects, are far from inspiring and motivating.
They are a national turnoff, if not a total disgrace. Do they compare at all with their counterparts in other countries in terms of achievement, experience, scholarship, research, and publications? Do they compare with their past counterparts in their own country, starting from the 1920s?Shortcut scholarshipIn addition, there are the problems of slim, shrunk, and shortcut course syllabi to attract more and more students who are weak or are working. There are the problems of long holidays, frequent strikes, and work abstentions.
There are the problems of instructors irresponsibly cutting classes and staying away from classes at will and teaching at more than one institution to make more money. What is even more dangerous is that instructors enjoy impunity and unaccountability, facing no risk of ever losing their job.
Even the ranking of the supposedly best-known university in the country, the University of Dhaka, is far from impressive due to many politically appointed faculty members with the selection obviously based on something dubious and duplicitous other than merit.
One of the factors for the lack of the good image or prestige and the low standard of higher education in Bangladesh is the large number of master’s degree-holding faculty members teaching at the colleges and universities. While they have only an MA, they strangely supervise PhD students and their doctoral theses. What audacity!
Unlike the rest of the world (where a great majority of the faculty possesses a PhD with a good amount of publications even), a great many in Bangladesh do not even hold a PhD to begin with.
The comment Finance Minister Muhith recently made about the quality of higher education teachers -- that they, with exceptions, are not properly qualified or well-informed and that there are no clear-cut hiring and promotion criteria to be strictly followed -- is very true (and the comment made by the teachers about his ministry is also equally true).
Then, again, most of those holding a PhD do not have any or enough publications. Despite the fact that they fall flat in terms of publications, they, unfortunately, get promoted to higher positions, which is unthinkable in other parts of the world.A lesser degreeA simple Google search can reveal how academically engaged, active, and dynamic even a PhD-holding assistant professor is with a long list of works to his/her credit in a developed country.
Bangladesh’s master’s degree is less than the same degree in other countries by at least one year, taking both undergrad and Master’s together.
