Should We Retain Our Senior Professors?

Lately in UKM, many if not all of the senior professors who have applied for a contract position after retirement have only been offered the special teaching scheme or pengajar khas which comes with a RM10000 monthly allowance. The top management explained that it has to take this position because of the lack of funds to support the salaries (and pension) of the senior professors especially those who are in the Jusa B and Jusa A bracket.

I believe that we have to be very careful about this. The blanket ruling will actually make us lose the excellent senior professors who are still contributing at the high level in terms of teaching, service and research. It is certainly not a waste of money to retain these productive senior professors and will in fact help maintain the image and status of our university. No top institutions in the world will ever let go of their best people. The old adage that says ‘Retain the Best’ appears in the strategy of all top universities and institutions.

We were told recently that at UKM, 36% of our 2000 academic staff members did not write a single paper in 2013. The figure for Universiti Malaya was only 10%. This is one key reason why UM has achieved their target of 2500 ISI-indexed papers for 2013 and we are trailing far behind. The publications data for 2014 so far looks even more worrying as UKM is at the last position behind UTM.

Any good management book will tell us that it is a waste of money to retain those who are not productive. We must tell these 36% or 720 lecturers to start delivering the goods and give them a year or two to deliver at least a paper. An alternative would be that they should be given more teaching and service load i.e. more than their counterparts who are doing teaching, service and also research. I like the carrot approach, but in our case the carrot has gone stale as our 36% of lecturers are choosing other vegetables instead. Whilst we seemed to be so tough on the talented senior professors who are retiring, we seemed to be overly gentle on those who are clearly not delivering their KPIs.

I believe that we should retain our best talent no matter how old they are. When the public talks about a university, they mention key figures in the respective disciplines. These figures are usually the senior professors who have established themselves as the authority of the subject matter in their respective fields. I agree there must be stringent criteria to assess those senior professors who should be retained. But if our quota or allocation to pay their last drawn salaries has been used up, we should ask the government for more and justify strongly for these cases. Otherwise we not only risk losing these prominent gurus to our neighbouring universities, but we will lose the status and credibility in the disciplines which these professors are linked to.

Professor Datuk Dr. A Rahman A Jamal (25^th May 2014)