Are you doing the right thing, Mr Academician?

This is an reply from a fellow colleague on the topic that I had posted earlier at: What is the real work of a university academician?

I referred to your blog, and some of the academician work that you have listed are:

1. Teaching
2. Research
3. Send papers for publications
4. Developing new curriculums based on the industry, economics and social needs
5. Supervising students on theses or research works
6. Write books
7. Attending or presenting papers in the conferences
8. Attending meetings
9. What else? ...


While I agree that these are some of the tasks that an acdemic perform, I feel that it is more important to emphasise the function of an academic. In a nutshell it is to remain relevant and useful to the industry AND society.

When academics are disconnected with the needs of society and the industry, we end up in the situation where:

• We teach well, but taught the wrong content,
• We research with accuracy but our findings are valueless to the society industry
• We develop curricullums and conform to all the quality standards, but we end up teaching in an excellent manner the wrong paradigms to our students
• We supervise research, but we merely quantify with SPSS what has happened historically when we should be developing concepts that help us manage in a chaotic world.
• We write books for the sake of publication, but never measure it with the acceptance by industry.
• We organise academic conference for academics so that we all can pay the conference fees and present our papers, never mind that nobody in the industry will want to pay the low fees to come and hear us speak.

The tasks that we list out will grow longer and academics will do more but produce less, as academic bureaucrats wrestle with "controlling" the situation by making us work towards all the wrong Key Performance Indices.

Carrying out the tasks of the academic is futile unless the work and graduates that we produce are relevant to the industry. We may have to stop and re-examine our role in the industry/society and country.

Are we doing things right when the Human Resource Ministry have to retrain our graduates, where no one believes in our SRP/SPM straight As students, and where HR managers sneer at our high percentage of 1st class and 2nd Upper Honours students who behave like diploma holders.

What do we say in reply to all the opinions that the public lay before us. Is it true that we are in an ivory tower still in blissful denial? Or should we become an academic like Peter Drucker, Kaplan and Norton where the industry look towards for guidance in a highly competitive world.

Any prizes for guessing why 90% of the top universities in the world are found in USA and Europe?

Our real work starts when we come out of our state of denial and re-connect ourselves back to the industry.