PhD to be the compulsory qualification for lecturers

Kenya has set a higher qualifications threshold for the appointment of university lecturers. In a directive to be implemented in the next five years, the Commission for Higher Education said only PhD holders would be allowed to teach at universities as lecturers.

Holders of masters degrees, no matter the years of experience or number of publications, will only be able to be appointed as junior lecturers and tutorial fellows.

Previously, universities had the leeway to appoint lecturers irrespective of whether or not they held a PhD.

The Ministry of Education has also raised concern over a trend in which lecturers take up teaching jobs at several institutions. Education Secretary Professor Jacob Kaimenyi said last Tuesday that conducting lessons in multiple institutions was hurting tutors’ ability to provide quality education to students and to conduct research.

Battling with rising student numbers

Kenya has been struggling to match rising enrolments with teaching staff.

According to government statistics, the number of professors in public universities has risen by a measly 11% over the past three years while student numbers had soared by 56% – from 140,000 in 2010 to more than 300,000 this year – generating an ever-rising student-to-lecturer ratio.

By the beginning of last year, the number of professors stood at 265, from 238 three years ago, meaning that Kenya’s public universities had a teaching workforce of 5,189, from around 4,800 three years ago – only 8% growth.

Lecturers have been forced to take on bigger workloads, possibly compromising an already shaky quality of learning.

Universities across the country have been on a recruitment drive, especially hiring scholars on part-time contracts to teach the growing number of students. Private universities have better lecturer-to-student ratios.

Raising thresholds

Commission for University Education Secretary, Professor David Some, said the threshold for being appointed a professor would also go up.

While currently people are required to accumulate only 10 application points from scholarly writing, in future a professor will need to have accumulated a minimum of 60 points.

Ordinarily, such points are awarded based on the number of books and level of books published by an individual – a book for use at the university level earns you more points than one for secondary school level, for instance.

For people to be appointed as associate professor, the guidelines will require them to have at least 48 publication points’ worth of scholarly writing, up from the current eight points.

They also must have supervised at least four postgraduate students, while a full professor must have supervised at least five PhD students. Currently, one can rise without having necessarily supervised PhD students.

“What we want is to create a level playing field in the appointment of lecturers and create order in the teaching system,” said Kaimenyi, the education secretary.

The commission said the new guidelines, which were a subject of discussion at a stakeholders’ conference last week, were meant to raise the bar on the quality of teaching at Kenyan universities – at a time of rising concerns over the quality of university graduates.

But some educationists said the country was aiming higher than the current state of the higher education system allowed, given a severe lecturer shortage.

The new directive is part of a wider government plan for universities to produce at least 1,000 PhDs every year, in order to produce the next generation of academics, alleviate the lecturer shortage and provide the high-level skills Kenya’s rapidly developing economy needs. The new PhD training programme is to be rolled out through scholarships.

Calls for caution

Media columnists were quick to castigate the directive, calling for caution.

“The directive should be applied with care. It should not follow that someone who holds only a masters degree is unqualified as a university teacher,” said Kenya’s Business Daily in an editorial last Wednesday.

“At a time when some universities are struggling to find lecturers, it should not be said that only PhD holders can be accepted as lecturers.

“Universities should encourage not just academic teaching and production of papers published in obscure journals, but also practical application of knowledge from industry. An engineer who has practised for many years and holds a masters degree could turn out to be a better teacher than a PhD holder.

“All this means that the guidelines should not be dogmatic, but should be applied with care,” said the newspaper.

Education experts and university administrators have argued that additional enrolments can only be handled if the government pumps more funds into higher education, so institutions can afford to expand educational and boarding infrastructure and hire extra tutors.