My friend, the Professor has little capability

My friend, the Professor has little capability

By E. Sadtono

SURABAYA, East Java (JP): It comes as no surprise that there
is a glut of professors in Indonesia. There are three kinds of
professor here: the real professor, the marginal professor and
the fake professor.

The real professor obtains their professorship through toil,
sweat, blood and tears. They get their doctorate first, undertake
research, write articles, read papers at national as well as
international seminars and teach at the undergraduate as well as
the graduate level. These doctoral degrees exclude the PhD's
bought from the degree-mills that abound in the U.S.

Marginal professors wrangle their professorship with a little
sweat but mainly by their academic or political position. They
have never gone to graduate school. If they did, they flunked.

Through an accumulated wealth of dubious community service,
attending seminars here and there, but never presenting a paper
or conducting research, their cumulative credit piles up. When
their brownie points meet the criteria for professorship
nomination, and they have made the right connections, they are
awarded a professorship as a token of someone's gratitude.

The fake professor is self-appointed. Their enormous wealth
allows them to establish a university while grabbing a doctorate,
and later a professorship, in an ambiguous field. Included in
this category are quack doctors who claim to be able to cure any
illness under the sun and put the word "professor" on their name
card.

My friend, the Professor, is a marginal professor. He was a
local senator and is still proud of it. He once entered graduate
school, but failed because he couldn't read textbooks written in
English. Now, when he teaches, he likes to quote names of eminent
English and American scholars and the titles of the books they
wrote. He also liberally uses English terms in his lectures.

His students are naturally impressed. However, one day it was
found that he assigns his students to translate the books and
articles he quotes. His students, whose English is no better than
his, usually ask a friend in the English department to do the
work. He later sells the translation as his own to new students.

When he was still a senior lecturer, he did not particularly
want to become a professor. However as academically inferior
colleagues began to be handed the impressive title, he decided to
jump on the bandwagon.

Moreover, his wife constantly nagged him to get a
professorship. Being the wife of a professor would give her an
edge over non-professor wives when the faculty wives met at the
arisan (a gossip club with a lucky draw) or Dharma Wanita, the
civil servants wives' club, or at her English conversation club.
Her ego would be very much boosted by becoming a professor's
wife.

She was tickled pink to hear that her husband's nomination had
been accepted. She joined the Women's International Club
immediately, and shared her excitement with the vegetable vendor
at her gate.

Second wedding

To be inaugurated as a professor, the candidate must read a
professorial address before the university senate and select
invitees. It was like a second wedding for the Professor's wife.
She planned an elaborate party, and invited relatives from far
and near as well as local big shots. It was a once in a lifetime
affair, and a declaration of being a professor's wife. She didn't
give a hang if the cost of the party was much higher than the
Professor's meager salary.

The professor-to-be wanted to deliver the perfect speech, so
he asked a close friend to read the draft. His friend, a real
professor, found a lot of dangling and subject-less sentences,
poor diction, confusing paragraphs, meandering streams of thought
and terrible incoherence. A big overhaul was in order.

After exhaustive rewriting, the real professor was given the
pleasure of reviewing the dissertation again. He glanced at it,
and said it was okay. The real professor didn't want to waste his
precious time reading a piece of hopeless junk. After all, only
the wife and grandchildren listened attentively to the speech.
The rest of the audience sat daydreaming about digging into the
sumptuous lunch prepared by the best caterer in town.

One benefit of being a professor is selling your name, not
necessarily your services, to a private university for a handsome
monthly fee. The Professor's name would only come to collect the
money.

Or he could cajole a minister in Jakarta to take him on as a
member of his team of experts. He couldn't care less if it's
called intellectual prostitution, everyone does it.

He became arrogant as soon as he became a professor. He
demanded to be able to teach at graduate school. According to the
Ministry of Education, a professor is entitled to teach at
graduate school. He said it was his right to teach and supervise
doctoral candidates.

Tough bunch

Unfortunately, for him, the graduate school's faculty are a
tough bunch. They don't allow professors without good
credentials, namely doctorates, to teach, let alone supervise
doctoral candidates. It would be ridiculous if the Professor, who
didn't even have a Masters, became a doctoral supervisor. The
graduate school is an elite unit and its faculty are very jealous
of the school. No wonder the marginal professors loathe them.

Strangely enough, some of the faculty members of the graduate
school who hold doctoral degrees from domestic as well as foreign
reputable universities don't become professors until they retire
or die. Meanwhile, people who have never tasted foreign
education, attended international conferences, conducted
significant research, written good articles or read and
comprehended textbooks in English, become professors fairly
easily.

Ironically, some of the marginal professors who flunked out of
graduate school were students of the lecturers who never get
professorships. Nothing is impossible in Indonesia.

The Professor is lucky he is not in Malaysia, where you
actually have to have a doctorate to be come a professor,
although he wouldn't have to run around just to earn a living. He
spends his time moonlighting at questionable private
"universities" in Blitar, Pasuruan, Probolinggo, Tulungagung,
Kediri and Banyuwangi to receive the same honorarium as his
colleagues the junior lecturers who were once his students.