Our lecturers . . . .

Last night I was with close to 10 friends from the same school that we attended decades ago. A few from Shah Alam, entertaining friends from Kelantan and Langkawi. There we were, from 10.30pm, with one or two excused themselves earlier, the rest stayed till about 2.30am. The conversation varied from asking about the missing years, since some never meet since more than 30 years ago, to current happenings in the country. But there was nothing about politics. Were they not interested? Or plain fed up!

I sat longer with one, till 2.30am, an experienced lecturer. He shared his 'philosophies' about being a 'professional lecturer', which grossly meant, forget about being 'a professor' and all those 'mundane' tags of being a lecturer. He told me he is focused on being a lecturer who contends with teaching the right things and concentrate on research. He shared that he has the biggest chunk of the research grant, bent on making the real cut to the world of real research. He is not into producing 'graduate salesmen', who tend to focus on appearance and presentation skills, but hollow with content.

He confided his doubt on the selection to 'professorship'. 50% of the lecturers in his department are at least holding "Associate Professor" status, but only 10% of them secured research grants, and only about half of these are credible research.

I have no further comment.