Prof Omar Shawkataly, a chemistry lecturer who recently retired, said teachers teach from text books and are more concerned about living up to the expectations of their students’ parents.

“The job of high school teachers is to make a person learn. But this is not the case in a university.

“In a university, lecturers are there not to teach a student. Their role is to make students listen critically so that they can ask critical questions and evaluate,” he said.

Omar, who has been a lecturer at public universities and private institutions of higher education for more than 30 years,  said this at the forum, The Fall of the Faculty: The Death of Professionalism, Integrity and Ethics.

It was organised by Gerakan Tenaga Akademik Malaysia (Gerak), a movement dedicated to discussing and debating issues on higher education in Malaysia.

Explaining that public universities at present observed the teaching method of outcome-based learning, Omar told participants, “Open screw and tighten nut. There are lesson plans every day.”

He also said that while there was a lot of pressure on lecturers to publish their work, the measurement used to evaluate the quality of the work published was questionable.

“People talk about the number of citations. But if you look at the quality, there is none.

“If you know the game, you know how to increase the number of citations,” Omar said.

He added that one of the ways was to inform present and former students to do citations on the work.

“You might say it is a coincidence because since universities started giving money for research work over the past few years, the number of citations have gone up.”

According to Omar, the allocation depended on which tier the project paper was on, with the higher the tier, the more money the lecturer would receive.

“Why should lecturers be given money to publish papers? That is our role,” he said, alluding to the issue of academic misconduct and ethics.

He claimed that due to this practice, universities ended up rewarding lecturers who did not deserve to be rewarded.

“We are giving a wrong signal to the younger generation.”

Furthermore, he said a lot of present chemistry students had not even grasped the fundamentals of the field of study.

“It is worrying because if they do not know the fundamentals, how are they going to teach the next generation,” he asked.

He said while universities wanted a 100% passing rate, students unfortunately did a lot of cut-and-paste work that if left unchecked, would only worsen.

Omar said he hoped to give more talks and find solutions to improve the quality of lecturers and education as a whole at public universities.