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.