Managements of self-financing arts and science colleges have apparently taken cognisance of the Higher Education Department's move to ease out those among the guest faculty in government colleges who have been continuing in the job without the UGC-specified NET/SET and/or Ph.D. qualifications, but the institutions are in a helpless situation.
Not all faculty they appoint are fully qualified as per UGC norms. Though the teachers without the specified qualifications are being instructed by the managements of self-financing colleges at the time of recruitment that they are required to fulfil UGC norms within a specified time, the ground realities have made the going rather tough for the faculty.
Getting through the NET/SET has become a tough proposition in very many subjects, mostly due to the un-uniform curricular content followed for UG and PG levels by the various universities, according to a teacher in a self-financing college whose repeated attempts to clear NET had gone in vain.
The other possibility for the faculty to remain in the teaching job in the higher educational institutions is completion of Ph.D. This avenue is also ridden with obstacles as getting the papers published in the UGC-specified refereed journals is turning out to be an uphill task for the research scholars.
In Bharathidasan University, for instance, though research scholars get their works published in journals specified in the Reference List of Quality Journal maintained by UGC-CARE (Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics), they face the ignominy of rejection.
It is because the reference list in UGC-CARE gets updated frequently. What is accepted at the time of submission of synopsis get rejected when the thesis is submitted in the event of the journal in which the works of the researcher is published is removed from the UGC-CARE list in the interregnum. "This is unfair for the research scholars," Principal of Jamal Mohamed College S. Ismail said.
The UGC had, in 2021, extended the mandatory requirement of Ph.D. qualification for teaching in colleges and universities by two more years, until 2023, in view of the COVID pandemic.
However, as things stand, the possibility for total compliance with this requirement is not even remote, college heads contend.
