Kuppi Talk

Last week’s Kuppi column, by Kaushalya Perera, focused on labour concerns at state universities and the impact of measures taken by the government on the recruitment and retention of academic staff. In this article, I specifically draw attention to the factors that affect attracting and retaining young lecturers and their career development in the state university system, especially at a time of economic crisis. To do this, I will use my own experiences and those of junior lecturers in the medical and dental fields with whom I have had conversations across several state universities.

A couple of years back, at a workshop on graduate employability (sponsored by World Bank loans), we were told that producing graduates was like producing cars. The buyers – potential employers – want to know what they are getting. Let’s consider this analogy at face value. We would then remember that the quality of a car depends on not one but multiple things, of which labour is a significant issue, as the Michigan automobile industry realized last year.