Professors are required to enrich students’ academics and carve them according to industrial needs. Previously from July 2021, anyone who wants to become a professor must complete their Ph.D. This has been announced by the minister of human resource development Prakash Javedekar. Apart from that, one has to achieve a master’s degree in that particular specialization to get enrolled as an assistant professor or a Ph.D. is absolutely fine along with the National eligibility test(NET). These regulations are made by the new University Grants Commission regulation. This decision has been made to ensure that the students are benefited from good quality education and better teaching facilities. Also, this decision was considered so as to develop universities’ research output and provide students with research skills. According to new rules, anyone who completed their Ph.D. from the top 400 universities is directly eligible to become an assistant professor. But these regulations are about to get updated again recently. Now Ph.D. is not mandatory at all to become a professor.
As per the sources, the University Grants Commission(UGC) is trying to involve industry experts in university teaching staff. For this reason, it has decided to curb the old mandatory Ph.D. requirement in the future to create vacancies for industry experts. In addition, UGC reportedly plans to create two new positions, Professors of practice and Associate professors of practice.
This decision is going to be taken to enhance industry skills and to provide teaching opportunities to industry experts who want to teach but halted as they don’t have a Ph.D. This is a major move by the UGC that can shape students for the upcoming realities and problems related to the field they are pursuing.
If this rule comes into the act in the future, UGC will only check industry experience while recruiting and keeping aside Ph.D. degrees for these special positions that are about to be created. This is a chance to improve the main drawback of our education system by implementing practical knowledge into the curriculum. This knowledge helps to deal with real-life situations that are about to be faced by the students and tackle those problems with the advice of industry experts. However, these roles may be full-time or part-time based on the course and institution, until now no clarification has been given by UGC. The plan is now only in the starting stages and nothing has been finalized. Soon a committee will be established about the involvement of industry experts.
