Why I'm not (and won't be) a Professor

A cursory glance at the world's dictionaries (or indeed Wikipedia) confirms that the title Professor does not carry a unique definition. In France for instance, my daughter's pre-school teacher was Professeur Gendt. In other countries such as the USA, Japan and several others, it refers to someone who is a member of faculty of a college or university. There are also various other definitions around the world ranging from referring to a person who is on tenure to the head of an academic department.
I must confess that in all of these senses, I am a Professor and am often referred to as such by various communities that meet at International meetings and conferences for the past decade or so (I used to correct them at the beginning but realised its futility as most of them couldn't understand what I was making a fuss about!).

In most commonwealth countries however, the term has a more specific meaning. It is the highest position within the hierarchy of academics in a university or college. The Latin term itself refers to a person who professes to be an expert in some art or science, a teacher of highest rank. This highest of meanings is what characterises the definition in these countries, including Sri Lanka.

Unfortunately, much of what constitutes that high ideal is missing in academics who are conferred that title in our university system today. Of course many of them possibly do profess to be experts in some art or science and so would qualify under the Latin definition (though whether they are so, is often unclear since the term expert itself has no unique meaning!). I do not consider myself as someone who has dedicated his life to research and academia to an extent that fits this lofty definition. To be sure, like everyone else, till around 2002, I did march along that road to promotion, collecting points to earn my right to be called a Professor, as could be seen by my online CV (in a frozen state since then). I wrote academic papers, presented them at conferences, supervised research projects, did my bit of administration, spent sabbaticals in prestigious research centres and reformed my teaching. I even totted up my points to see if I had enough to be at least an Associate Professor!

The current Professor promotion scheme in Sri Lanka, is so minutely specified, that it can be targetted by any academic without any interest in research or teaching leave alone the lofty ideal of contributing to the global body of knowledge! Indeed anything in life that is so tightly specified often falls into the pitfall that renders the system quite useless. In case of doubt, consider whether we really are identifying all those who are really gifted learners in our Grade 5 scholarship exam – or is it only those who can retain the most from a particular year in school (Grade 5) that is turning out to be as good a definition of hell for them as we can device!

As someone has said, in most cases, we value what we can measure (read: reading, writing and arithmetic – or for that matter: quantitative, analytical and verbal; and call it IQ) rather than trying to measure what we should value (read: kinesthetic, spatial, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal skills also; including measures such as EQ).

All this is not to refute the claim that Sri Lanka has indeed produced some men and women who have dedicated their lives in the pursuit of knowledge and its sharing. Indeed there are even a handful to be found in the universities these days! There are also several who were never bestowed the title since they were either not in university employment or their contributions were not recognized at the time.

This brings me to my top 10 reasons for not being (and not striving to be) a Professor.

10. Some of the best researchers in my field, and many other fields I am aware of, around the world are simply Mr. (and some Dr.)

9. Professor is nothing more (and arguably, nothing less) than a designation in a university – not a qualification to be flaunted in public for all purposes

8. If professors call themselves Prof. why not directors, Dir., managers, Man., executives, Exec. or indeed architects, Arch., philosophers, Phil. or composers, Comp.?

7. Whether one is a Distinguished Senior Professor at Harvard, MIT or Stanford, or an Associate Professor (or Assistant in some cases) at one of the many tens or hundreds of colleges of a little known university in some far flung country, your title would be the same, simply Prof.

6. The fraternity (of Professors) is not one particularly honouring to belong to anymore in Sri Lanka – check out any university Senate here these days!

5. The quest to give yourself in service, and that of collecting points to become a professor are not always aligned – often one is done at the expense of the other

4. The title Prof. is often used as a title of elitism rather than one signifying a dedication to a life spent in the creation and dissemination of knowledge

3. Professorship has made most who posses it become conceited and puffed up rather than making them humble and indebted to the society that nurtured them (as I personally believe it should)

2. The title Professor is aspired to more often than not by those who rely on it as their main source of identity (which I personally am not in need of)

And my top reason for not being (nor wanting to be) a Professor is:

1. I do not consider myself as having spent my life (or spending what's left of it) in the pursuit of knowledge creation and dissemination the way the masters of scientific research did in the past (nor I suspect are many of my colleagues who have joined that fraternity or are frantically striving to!)

The Falacy of the Virtue of Quick Decision Making

Perceptions of what constitutes efficient and effective decision making are probably the most confusing aspect of leading in administration. While textbook notions of quick decision making seem to be desired in a theoretical sense, even considered decisions, if not favourable to personal preferences, are often interpreted as ineffective and weak. Owing to the legacy inherited from the bus driver model of leadership in every sphere of life we encounter however, decision making by those in the ranks is never given any importance. As such, most employees live in the dichotomy of not being able to decide and not happy with the decision making of others.

Supervisors are not immune to this disease. Sporting a false sense of guilt each time a decision negatively affects even a single subordinate, supervisors typically distance themselves from the decision making process and instead walk on the thin line between commradarie and supervision. The result is either insubordination of those under them or being at the receiving end of their wrath over unpopular decisions.

Strategy has become of utmost importance in decision making in the organization. One important strategy which I have come to learn through reflection is the opposite virtue of what is given in the textbook: only respond after 24 hours wherever possible! This single strategy has already borne much fruit especially when confronted with seeming impasse and conflict situations.

Leading - as the Bus Driver or the Orchestra Conductor?

The model of leadership most commonly expected in Sri Lankan society in general appears to be the most extreme form of leading from the front – that embodied in the bus driver model. There could be many reasons for this ranging from it being the natural model in a maternalistic society to the general inertia in public sector organizations[1]. In general, a majority in such organizations expect to be led by the top in an almost dictatorial way so that individual thinking and responsibility is minimal. Using the bus driver analogy, most are happy to be passengers who can assume that the driver will take them to the desired destination.

This was one of the few issues I knew I needed to address from the very outset. Making use of my first address to the entire staff of just over 100 employees at the time, I emphasized the fact that I was a very bad bus driver. I did not have the skills required to take the organization where it should go. However, I was confident that the senior staff in the organization could grow into a very potent force in brining about radical change to the organization which would take it to its next level of operation.

As such, I reiterated that the model of leadership would change to the Orchestra model. The main requirement for this was for individuals to excel in different dimensions of the organization’s business with me simply playing the role of the conductor. I am grateful to several senior academics and administrators who appear to have excelled in this metamorphosis to a participatory leadership structure.

Overall however, especially in the lower ranks of the organization, there appears to be some confusion over the model change with a minority even verbalizing their belief that it signifies a weakening of the organization itself.

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[1] It is not uncommon to hear that one of the key reasons for individuals joining the university is its relative ‘laid backness’ and perceived ‘freetime’ to do other things apart from its job security.

To Lead or to Manage

One of the key realizations I had to face was the fact that between the dual roles of leader and manager that one is often called upon to play as a head of a department or an institution in the university system, is that my skill at the latter was at best, below average. While I love to initiate new things and see others initiating new things, continuing such initiatives through after they are proved to work in a systematic way does not come easily to me. For this reason, one of my chief requests in my application for the post of Director of the UCSC was that, if selected, I would need a hard working manager as Deputy Director. While it is unusual for a candidate to a post to make such conditions even before being selected, I am grateful to the Interview Panel and then the Board of Directors for acceding so precisely to this request.

Since being appointed Director of the School in May 2004, I have had to learn fast on the job, the many and diverse lessons of administrative maneuvering in order to get a job of work done. Some of these are quite different from what the typical paternalist Western textbooks posit about them, with most needing to be adapted and tempered to the complex uncertainties of a maternalist Sri Lankan society.

Needless to say, my learning curve ‘on the job’ has still been steeper than it probably ought to have. Administration and management are skills which have as much or more to do with the psychomotor and affective domains than the cognitive domain, so that there can be little substitute to learning ‘on the job’.

Some examples of the disjoint between the textbook and reality which have transpired in my short tenure of just under 2 years as Director of the School include perceptions of the model of leadership, the interpretation of the flat organizational structure, the virtues of instant decision making, and the methods of showing dissent.

Learning Administration on the Job!

One of the roles an unsuspecting academic is invariably called to play sooner or later in one’s career is that of an administrator. That there is no prior training made mandatory for academics in this regard has never been understood as a serious omission in their continuing professional development. My own realization of the inadequacy of possessing such skills prompted me from fairly early on in my academic career to seek training aimed at mitigating this lack.

Owing to the limited training opportunities which were readily available in the areas that were relevant to the university setting, the setting up of the Staff Development Centre at the University of Colombo in the 1990’s was a most welcome phenomenon – providing me and other academics a very useful resource for self improvement. Apart from the learning opportunities it provided, the training programmes conducted by the Centre also brought together like-minded academics who were facing very similar issues.

Even though at the time, I did not hold any major administrative posts, these workshops prompted me to seek institutional membership of the British Council with the express view of borrowing the excellent training videos that started populating the then rather thin video collection. Some of the more relevant material was then shared with my fellow academics at the then Department of Statistics and Computer Science, with sometime for discussion after the viewing of the video concerned. Some of the areas covered in these videos included Time Management, Managing Meetings, Prioritizing Work, and Ethics at Work.

An extended ‘double-term’ sabbatical in 2001 and 2002 helped me in numerous ways to glean some of the essential skills and practices which were going to be extremely important upon my return to accept the headship of a department in the newly formed University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC). While much of the learning happened through reading and finding resources on the Internet, the Human Resources Service Centre at the Carnegie Mellon University provided an excellent environment for concentrated learning of a wide cross-section of administrative and academic topics. Some of the areas of key importance included workshops and sessions on Emotional Intelligence, Conflict Management, Personality Types, Problem Based Learning, Peer & Student Evaluation, and Curriculum Design.

Since returning to the UCSC in 2003, I have had to play a progressively increasing administrative function commencing with being appointed the Head of the Department of Computation and Intelligent Systems. Several short periods as Acting Director of the School also helped equip me with some of the finer points related to administration in the Sri Lankan context, often requiring the adaptation of modern management practices of the West which dominates much of the literature and training content.

Level 3 Teaching for Deep Learning

In an increasingly competitive world, obtaining qualifications at any cost has come to be considered more important than gaining deep knowledge. A focus on getting a task over with in minimum time and with lowest possible effort characterizes surface learning. The skills thus practiced are the lower-end cognitive skills and do not usually have the effect of changing one’s behaviour at the end of the process.

The motivations for deep learning stem from a self-perceived desire to know something for ones self. A deep approach to learning is necessarily intrinsically motivated and results more often in some change in the behaviour pattern of the learner concerned.

McGregor’s (1960) categorization of human trustworthiness in the context of the enterprise can apply to the teaching-learning climate in the classroom. Teachers operating on the basis of Theory X assume that students are inherently lazy, they will always try to cheat at exams, they will not attend lectures, and they won’t make an effort at learning. So, strict attendance criteria, careful monitoring of examinations, deterrent punishments all become the modus operandi of the teaching process. Theory Y teachers on the other hand assume that students do their best when given freedom to take control of their own learning. As such more opportunities for self-learning, take-home assessments, peer-evaluation are provided in order to make them flourish.

John Biggs’ (2003) classification of 3 levels of teacher focus helps to clarify the different attitudes most commonly encountered in the teaching-learning environment. In this classification, a Level 1 teacher focuses on what the student is. In other words, the teacher sees him or herself as the transmitter of knowledge in a constant kind of way and leaves it up to the students to catch or miss what was meant to be transmitted. If learning does not happen, the reasons usually attributed to it are the students’ low Z-scores, lack of motivation, bad school background, and other innate weaknesses. This is fundamentally a blame-the-student theory of learning and is similar to the Theory X view in organizations described before.

The Level 2 teacher focuses on what the teacher does to achieve good learning in students. The responsibility of ‘getting through’ to the students in this view rests largely on the teacher. Hence the focus is to find better ways of performance in order to achieve better results. Plenty of preparation, variations of technique, use of multimedia, and in general a good management strategy of the teaching process characterize this kind of learning environment. In short this is a blame-the-teacher model. The results achieved through these means however often are not satisfactory enough to justify the effort and soon the teacher could be discouraged with the limited effect they have on learners.

A Biggs Level 3 teacher concentrates on what the student does rather than what the teacher does or what the student is. Here teaching is seen as supporting learning. So, like a level 2 teacher, a variety of techniques would be employed typically in this case too, but each with a specific purpose of engaging the student in learning. In level 3 teaching the fundamental epistemological questions are rephrased as “what does it mean to understand content the way we want it to be?” and “what kind of teaching-learning activities must the student be exposed to in order to achieve such understanding?”.

Integral Worldview: My Philosophy of Things... and Teaching!

In what I refer to as my new awakened state of life, my mission statement in life has become (indeed it has stood constant ever since my graduation) to live a life consistent to my belief/faith: in other words, to align my Weltanschauung[1] and my religious convictions. To this end, I am in a constant struggle to make sense of the world around me through the values of a creator-sustainer God of the Universe. These values include but are not limited to, the sacredness of human life, the intrinsic value of others, caring for the marginalized, stewardship of the environment, importance of forgiveness, and the centrality of humility.

My quest for imparting learning to students and other seekers in the walk of life stems from these values. Since my overall philosophy of life stems from a conviction of a Good God who creates and sustains the universe as we know it, Life to me is an act of gratitude to God in my worldview. In His mercy, He has also put me among some incredible people along life’s path who influenced me and gave me without seeking any return – thus displaying some of His very qualities. I in turn, don’t just believe in being grateful to those who give me – and using their wisdom for my personal benefit, but see the working out of my gratitude to them in the act of giving to others from whom I cannot expect any return.

This then is the basis of my motivation for improving the effectiveness of my teaching – both to students and to peers. Its result, especially in the fast moving discipline of Information and Communication Technology is of producing individuals far more knowledgeable in the field than me, far quicker. What motivates me to not be discouraged by this phenomenon is my confidence in my effectiveness in imparting such knowledge to a wider population when compared to most who learn from me.

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[1] A German word which roughly translates to ‘worldview’ in English.