University lecturers do not want to spend time on scientific research because
they have to spend time on other responsibilities which can bring them money.
That explains why many lecturers, though not having done scientific research work for a long time, can
still teach at classes.

Lecturers busy with
teaching, forgetting about scientific research

Dr
Le Thi Tuyet Hanh from the Education Management Institute said that for many
university lecturers scientific research is not the “vital need”. For example,
the Hanoi National University,
has to return hundreds of millions dong or billions dong of the state budget
allocated to the university every year to fund scientific research, because the
school did not use the money.

According
to Associate Professor Dr Nguyen Manh Quan from the Hanoi
Economics University,
in the last 10 years, every professor and associate professor in Vietnam has
published 0.58 scientific articles. Meanwhile, schools are facing difficulties
with transferring technology. At universities, lecturers have been focusing on
teaching in order to earn money, while they do not have much time to spend on
scientific research.

Le
Minh Tien, Lecturer of the HCM City Open University, also said that the main
source of income of lecturers comes from teaching. Lecturers do not want to
spend money on conducting research because this work takes a lot of time, and
it does not contribute to their salary. In general, every lecturer has teaching
hours 200-300 percent more than the number of hours they are required to
have.

Associate
Professor Bui Van Mien from the HCM City Agriculture and Forestry University,
said that a lecturer of state-owned schools would get 25,000 dong for every
standard teaching hour, while the lecturers with titles of associate professor
or professor would get 50,000 dong at maximum. Meanwhile, private independent
run schools pay 80,000-120,000 dong for every teaching hour. The high pay has
prompted lecturers of state owned schools to rush to have extra teaching hours
at private schools.

Tien
said that lecturers nowadays do not have the “driving force” for scientific
research, therefore it is understandable why they do not wish to spend time on this
work. Meanwhile, there is no regulation about how lecturers will be punished if
they do not fulfill their scientific research duties. Many lecturers, though
having no scientific research projects for a long time, still can teach at
classes.

What to do to settle
the problems?

Tien
has suggested applying a new method which he believes will help encourage
lecturers to do scientific research. He said that it is necessary to allow
lecturers to convert the hours spent on scientific research into teaching hours.
This means that if lecturers spent significant time on scientific research,
they will be able to reduce the number of teaching hours. The mechanism, if
applied, will allow lecturers to live on scientific research.

Meanwhile,
Nguyen Quoc Vong, a lecturer of Hanoi
Agriculture University
and RMIT, said that there is no need to encourage all the current 61,000
university lecturers to conduct scientific research and allocate budgets to all
of them. Now, each scientific research can receive 10 million dong from the
state budget, and the egalitarianism is clearly unreasonable. It will be
impossible to have outstanding scientific research with such modest fund. The
state should concentrate only on some key universities and help the
universities become research universities.

Source: Nguoi lao
dong