Under normal conditions, the number of courses one lecturer teaches in one academic year must not be more than four in research universities.

There is a correlation between the problems I addressed in the last two Saturdays and the number of lectures one lecturer teaches in a week. In research-oriented universities, lecturers teach four courses in average in an academic year. This can be three, five and even six courses depending on the research performance of the faculty member and sometimes on the conditions.

Assuming that there are two semesters in an academic year, this means a lecturer teaches two courses in every semester and 8 hours a week. He or she uses the rest of the week to develop his/her skills, do research, guide his/her thesis students, speak in conferences, grade exams or assignments and so on.

30-40 hours of lecture a week

However, in a considerable part of the universities in Turkey, some lecturers teach (or pretend to teach) courses 30-40 hours a week. Many universities offer evening courses in bachelors or masters level alongside the regular bachelor degree programs. What is more, some programs are quite populated. This means that the lecturer has to teach several lessons and grade thousands of papers. Some associate professor candidates maintained that they did not conduct sufficient number of studies because they had to teach too many courses. Though this is mostly used as an excuse, it is true. In my previous commentary, I argued that it might be wise to define two separate categories: research universities and training universities. Under normal conditions, the number of courses one lecturer teaches in one academic year must not be more than four. This number can be higher in training universities. But it is evident that teaching for 30-40 hours a week implies a gigantic workload, which is against the nature of a university. It is apparent that an academic staff member who undertakes this load will have to time to follow up the recent developments for his/her self improvement.

There are two underlying reasons for this phenomenon: first, wages of academic staff members are low. They receive an extra payment for evening courses, the amount of which can become significant compared to their normal wage. Second, some faculties which have only a few lecturers offer master programs and evening programs. This is obviously related with the first factor. But such outlook can arise also because of the pressure of the university administration.

The problem (wage-number of lectures-inability of self-improvement-low quality of education-inability to conduct high-quality research) can also be read as follows: hundreds of thousands of high school students rush in private teaching institutions to be able to get into a university. They study all day. They go through a tense process lasting for months and find no time for social activities that will contribute to their self-development. Their parents both suffer financially and share their tension throughout the process.

But when you calm down and think, is not this weird? What is weirder is that, the institutional structure causing these problems did not fall from sky; we built it. And now we are unable to work things out.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 18.06.2011