If some studies had not been published, and fewer trees would have been cut and less paper would have been wasted.

I addressed the disincentive mechanisms in the academic life and the weird results these give way to focusing on the associate professor qualification examinations. I stressed two findings about the candidates. First was that, there existed significant qualitative differences between the studies conducted by candidates, which is quite unnatural. Second, some candidates are not aware of the high-quality studies in the field they lecture. . In some extreme cases the candidate teaches MA or PhD level courses but does not know the names, let alone the contents of the generally accepted and though books in the field. And the main problem with some jury members is that they ask questions that are not related with the field of specialty of the candidate. 

Some studies should not have been conducted
So, how the written rules and practices, that is, the institutional structure of the associate professor qualification exams must be changed so that such problems are minimized? In order to answer this question, we should examine how such problems occur in the first place. What sort of disincentive mechanism does the existing institutional structure create that such problems occur frequently?

First, let me focus on the qualitative differences of the studies candidates conduct. This difference is normal to some degree; they have different qualifications and educational attainments. The qualitative difference that I consider problematic is that some studies would have made bigger contributions to Turkey if they have not been conducted at all. If they had not been published, papers and time of those who are to evaluate those studies would not have been wasted, and fewer trees would have been cut. Of course the way to minimize this problem is to improve the educational attainment of new lecturers to be recruited.

Title does not have a meaning
Unfortunately, the PhD degree does not imply an advanced educational attainment. In most of the cases, the titles do not have any meaning at all. This relates to a huge problem that I will address later: doctorate level programs are mostly low-quality. This is the case not only with Turkey; some programs in foreign universities also suffer from this problem.

To overcome this problem, doctorate programs for each discipline can be ranked. When recruiting academic staff members, those rankings can be taken into account where candidates from the top-ranking universities get higher scores and candidates from low-ranking universities can qualify on the basis of different criteria of success. Other solutions can be named too; but I will skip at this point since I will address the issue again later.

It is not easy to overcome the problems related to the qualification of recruited academic staff. Even if this problem is solved, some might not like conducting and publishing academic research and might want to settle with being good lecturers. This is a reasonable will; but in that case qualifying as associate professor must not be tied to the rule of having a certain number of publications at a certain quality.

One way to overcome the problem might be grouping universities in two categories: research universities and others. The latter must offer very high-quality education maximum at masters degree and they must not be allowed to offer doctorate programs. If such distinction is made, qualification examinations might also make sense. Candidates who studied in research universities would be expected to have conducted high-quality research and this requires to substantially improving the current qualitative and quantitative thresholds. On the other hand, candidates from regular universities would be expected to follow up and employ the latest developments in their fields of specialty.

In order to overcome the above problems, such an arrangement must be accompanied with arrangements in another field. How many hours in a month will academic staff lecture? Given the case with Turkey, this question is not weird at all. I will continue.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 11.06.2011