JONATHAN JANSEN | Who’s handing out all these professorships like candy?

In a corrupted country where everything is for sale, one should perhaps not be surprised that the recklessness award of professorships has again made the news.

Being a manager of an academic entity does not make you a professor no more than sleeping in a garage makes you a four-door sedan. Are we so desperate for credentialing that these hard-earned achievements are being handed out left, right and centre?

In the Future Professors Programme of the department of higher education & training, young aspiring professors at the senior lecturer level sometimes work for decades to meet the standards of the professoriate. They have to consistently publish scores of articles in accredited journals including a mix of the top outlets in fields like microbiology, public law and economics.

In the case of the humanities, a scholarly book or two with a leading academic publisher moves you closer to the award of associate or full professor. They also have to show evidence of having graduated to completion Masters’ and doctoral students. Aspirant professors would have taught at an acceptable level measured in terms of what is called the scholarship of teaching. Then there is the performance of academic duty such as reviewing articles for learned journals and sometimes editing a major journal or book series in your area of expertise. Hard, hard, hard work that leads, for a few, to the cherished title of professor.

It is an insult to these hardworking academics when universities hand out these titles with alarming frequency. There are many other ways in which to reward public service and achievement: but why a professorship?

Some do it, no doubt, to win favour from a politician or influencer. Others are more blunt: get your hands on their money in these times of fiscal constraint in universities. What I know for sure about the institutions that engage in this form of duplicity is that they have no idea what a professorship means in the currency of higher education. It tends to be the same places where at some point you could buy your diploma or degree.

The ultimate loser in this debacle is the public. The dilution of the professoriate means that we no longer recognise achievement as a condition for status achievement.

The ultimate loser in this debacle is the public. The dilution of the professoriate means that we no longer recognise achievement as a condition for status achievement. Wits academic Srila Roy put her finger on the problem in reference to the award of doctorates: “The celebritisation of the PhD in South Africa is not helping: students are applying thinking they can do it in ONE year ... there is no sense that this is a scholarly project or of its scale/scope.” Correct, the message we send out into the public is that any fool can get these honours.

In June of this year the Council on Higher Education (CHE), a statutory body that advises the minister, published a timely newsletter called Briefly Speaking on the appropriate use of academic titles. The proliferation of associated titles (adjunct professor, visiting professor and so on), the author/s argue, “potentially dilutes what it means to be a professor” and rightly point out that the designation professor was “previously only associated with someone who was ‘professing’ at the time.” My fear is that the horse has bolted on this one for there is now a new category: professor of practice. What on earth is that?

The stories are now legend about university personalities in South Africa going to claim a professorship from some obscure Bible school or “international” university in the Caribbean or the US where a short investigation would reveal these to be unaccredited or self-accredited entities. Shameless, this pursuit of status. Of those desperados I often wonder: what emptiness resides within, that you need a title to give meaning to your empty life?

The CHE is right to only offer guidelines. It would be unwise to tell universities what to do when it comes to the appropriate use of academic titles. Government intervention is always undesirable. But then universities have to take it on themselves to be sensible and judicious in the awarding of titles such as professor or risk losing their credibility in the public mind.

The desperation for the status of titles is of course not limited to the academy. Apparently, anyone who goes into space, for however long, is duly baptised as an astronaut. As one comic put it when a group of celebrities including Katy Perry and Gayle King launched into the skies, “if going into space for three minutes makes you an astronaut, then I’m a gynaecologist.”