Why I quit teaching
A former professor ‘celebrates’ Teachers’ Day by explaining why he left teaching---because of the nonsense, deceit, and shenanigans he encountered in the academic world.
The PhD holders he saw helped him change his mind, says ANONYMOUS
Yesterday was Teachers’ Day. Chances are that you have already read one article too many, and far too many tweets, on the meaninglessness of the one-day tokenism while the government remains callous towards the teaching fraternity’s travails. The concerns they raise are grave. But let us not forget to laugh at ourselves and share with the world the inanities of our own universe.
I am a PhD in Communication who, after working as Assistant Professor on contract in a reputed city college and a new Central University in India, has recently decided to quit teaching. But what prompted my decision primarily is not the pathetic treatment that thousands of ad-hoc and temporary teachers receive in private colleges and central universities but rather disillusionment with the disgraceful ways in which a new generation of aspirants try to grab and sustain teaching jobs in universities.
If I come across as unreasonably harsh on the entire fraternity, it is only because being in the discipline of Communication can gravely diminish one’s own self-respect, and respect for the community by extension.
The discipline of Communication hardly produced PhD holders in any significant number until six to seven years back. But now, if you look at the list of candidates shortlisted for the entry level job of Assistant Professor in any central university, you will see at least 25-30 PhD holders. For a discipline which is still struggling to define its academic grounds, this rise in the number of PhDs is massive, even suspicious.
When I worked in the department of communication in one of the newly set up central universities in the South, I had a colleague who, by the age of 25, had two Masters to his credit, had completed his PhD in 2.5 years, and claimed two years of teaching experience gained ‘’while’’ pursuing his PhD, in addition to one year of “professional experience” in working with a television channel. He even had seven or eight “international publications” to his credit.
When I told him I took five years to complete my PhD and that I had managed to get only one international publication, he asked me how old I was. I said 34. He asked: “And you are not married too? Don’t worry, you will find beautiful girls on campus here easily.”
Suspicious credentials
In fact, it has become difficult to come across a young PhD holder who doesn’t have at least a few international publications to his or her credit. However, it is not mandatory that the candidate has such publications to secure the job of Assistant Professor. When this is the case, often the publications that candidates show in their CVs, obtained from shady journals that take money to publish anything that one sends them without any peer-review or proof reading, can in fact work against their application if the employer decides to have even a cursory look at the article titles, the credibility of the journals, etc.
A friend of mine teaching in a premier higher education institute in India told me about a recent incident when a candidate who was shortlisted for a temporary job was almost disqualified after the final scrutinizing committee raised suspicions about his publications. The candidate impressed the selection panel with his job talk and presentation; the panel recommended his name for the position. But a committee that scrutinizes the credentials before the offer letter is sent out found out that the article mentioned in his CV had appeared in a shady journal, and founda grammar mistake in the title of his paper.
This was conveyed to the professor in charge of the recruitment in the department who called up the candidate and told him about it. The candidate said he will look into it and get back. The next day, he sent a fresh pdf of the article after correcting the grammar mistake in the title, saying the problem had been rectified now! The good professor advised him that he had better remove the publication from his CV so that it looks clean, and send the CV again.
Today, if you check the profiles of many young assistant professors in universities, you will see that what they claim as their qualification in terms of the number of publications is in fact a loud proclamation of the suspicious ways in which they have tried to deceive their employers. All this, when perhaps many of them would have qualified for the job without resorting to such fraudulence.
Inane interviews
But, do our institutions care? Until recently, one could come up with certain ideological explanations for this or that trend that one identifies in the pedagogic emphases and practices in a university or a discipline, the recruitment patterns and candidate preferences, etc. Now, things have gone beyond human comprehension to understand what institutions want. Let me recount the story of the last job interview that I attended in the same university when interviews were held in May 2016 for permanent appointments to the department which ran for three years with three contractual faculty members. The post was that of Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication.
As soon as the interview began, one gentleman on the panel asked me to give a demo lecture on “corporate social responsibility”. I tried telling them that it makes better sense to ask me to do the lecture on a theme that I am comfortable with. The only woman on the interview panel pounced on me by asking: ‘’Why do you expect to get questions of your choice in an interview?’’. As if she was going to checkmate me, she asked: “If we take you here, and if we ask you to make a documentary on corporate social responsibility, will you refuse to do it?” She sounded as if I could have been asked to leave the interview hall instantly if I had said, “yes, I will definitely refuse to do it”.
I gave a lecture on corporate social responsibility while cursing in my mind the day I decided that academics is a saner field compared to journalism. Once the signal came from one of the panel members that I could stop my lecture, the Vice Chancellor thought it was his moment to display his knowledge. He asked, “So, this thing that you were talking about all this while, what is it called?”
I couldn’t make sense of the question. I asked him to repeat the question. “There is a name by which what you were talking about is called. What is it?” he said. I still couldn’t make much sense of what was going on. Seeing the clueless look on my face, the wise man finally said: “It is called CSR – corporate social responsibility.”
Another gentleman took over from there, by asking: “What is same language translation?” It was perhaps the first time I came across the term. But I guessed he could be talking about the old practice on MTV and music channels of scrolling the lyrics of a Hindi song while the song is being played on the channel.
I asked him if that was what he meant. He continued, “Tell us the two benefits of same language translation.” Now it was my task to imagine the bulleted two advantages of “same language translation”, and I thought myself, perhaps this man coined it in one of his papers. I decided to play along. “Sir, I watch shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Star TV, and Last Week Tonight on HBO, etc., and the subtitles help me follow the English being spoken better, because it is not always easy for me to follow American English.”
The gentleman seemed agitated, and he corrected me: “It is not subtitles. It is same language translation.” Oops, I apologized. I found it difficult not to laugh out loud when he then asked me, “OK, tell me the second advantage.” By then, I was more in a mood to properly record the sequence of events in the interview without missing out on the details so that I could have fun later recounting it to my friends. I pleaded ignorance again. The gentleman enlightened me: “It helps people pick up the spelling of words.”
The author completed his PhD in Communication from a central university in India a few years back, after working as a journalist for three years. He has taught Communication for three years. He is currently a homemaker
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