'Taxi faculty' parks itself at institutes

B-schools are paying faculty per lecture to save staff cost.

Pradyumna Vyas, Director of National Institute of Design (NID), is facing a problem of plenty.

The institute, Vyas has realised, is dependent on around 220-odd visiting faculty. Vyas plans to increase the batch strength of the faculty development programme on campus to tackle this problem and increase the strength of core faculty.

But not all B-schools wish to go the NID way. Many are just happy with only visiting faculty on campus. So much so that the core faculty is minimal.

Industry experts say the mushrooming of B-schools has created a new breed of ‘taxi faculty’ on campus; it works out cheaper. In the last two decades, the number of B-schools has gone up from 1,500 to 3,000.

“This is a predominant trend in most of the B-schools today due to faculty shortage and reluctance on the part of institutes to recruit full-time faculty. Especially, after the Sixth Pay Commission, when the average faculty salaries went up,” says Bakul Dholakia, Ex-Director of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

Dholakia adds that while a visiting teacher can be paid a remuneration within the range of Rs 500 to Rs 1,500 or more, depending on the institute’s requirements, many a time, it becomes imperative for colleges to have visiting faculty especially when they offer around 70-80 electives to offer specialisations as well.

“So, a college has two choices either to restrict their electives; or provide students with enough faculty,” Dholakia says.

The trend, say industry observers, is more visible in the B-schools located in and around Delhi.

“The faculty members of some of the top B-schools teach more in the lower-rung private B-schools than in their own institute. This is a clear misuse of the freedom and time they get. Instead of interacting with industry and doing research, which can also be a source of additional income for them, they prefer moonlighting,” says Premchand Palety, CEO, Cfore, a centre for B-school ranking.

Palety adds that many entrepreneurs who have quit or lost corporate jobs, work full time as visiting faculty and keep hopping to various B-schools on an hourly basis.

While there is no data to establish this, Crisil, which recently forayed into grading of B-schools, says around 40 per cent of the 29 programmes it graded, depend on visiting faculty to meet their needs.

"While quality B-schools have more core faculty than visiting faculty, newer B-schools could not afford this kind of faculty and showed inability to attract good quality faculty as well.

Here the ratio of visiting faculty was more than core faculty strength. Availability of enough good quality faculty and attrition among faculty were two of the features we found that ailed some B-schools,” says Hetal Dalal, head, education grading, Crisil.

According to the All India Council for Technical Education, the ratio for faculty to students is 1:15, uniform across courses. There is no mandate for visiting faculty which is why a lot of B-schools utilise them.While the role of a guest lecturer is limited to one or two classes, a visiting faculty member might take almost half the course and also sometimes evaluate students on exams and projects.

Suresh Ghai, Director, KJ Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research says, “B-schools should use senior industry professionals for imparting industry insight to the students.” The institute has 70 full-time faculty. Its visiting faculty base for full-time courses is about 10 to 15 percent while it is 20 to 30 per cent for short-term courses. The institute has taken up initiatives to for faculty mentoring

To offset this shortage of a trained pool, even universities have resorted to tie-ups with foreign universities and having visiting faculty. In 2010, around top 22 universities in India had 34 per cent vacancy in teaching jobs. New central universities had appointed temporary or guest faculty on contract to meet their immediate requirements.

(With inputs from Kalpana Pathak)