Life Is Expensive, Labor Is Cheap

Students taking university entrance exams often complain: "We are tested with 180 minutes after 12 years of education." They are right. 

There is another group that is neglected and whose protests fall on deaf ears because their numbers do not reach the millions: academics applying for associate professorship. To give you an idea of their numbers: "In the October 2023 period, 8,234 candidates applied for associate professorship through the Associate Professorship Information System." (uak.gov.tr)

Academics prepare an associate professorship file consisting of their work, which can run into hundreds or sometimes even thousands of pages, and apply to the Interuniversity Council as associate professor candidates. 

Unfortunately, our professors, whose primary duty in our country is to teach, prepare evaluation reports on these thousands of pages of work only if they can find the time between teaching and administrative tasks. It is a huge burden for both the applicant and the evaluator. Woe to those who try to do the job properly. Our professors are forced to not only read thousands of pages but also browse the literature, evaluate the articles mentioned in the application file, and examine the journals where these works were published. 

Our professors do not have enough time to do all this. As a result of the lack of specialization in our country, our professors are also forced to evaluate work in fields where they are not direct experts. Indeed, this is a problem in itself. It is a complete disaster that the person who will find and carefully read the hundreds of pages of work of an associate professor candidate—who is trying to specialize directly in a specific field—among many other candidate files is not an expert in that field. 

As if all this were not enough, the professor may not even do their job properly. They can easily prepare one-page, or even 10-15 line, evaluation reports filled with statements that are practically proof that they did not read the work. 

One associate professor candidate says: "I have more than 20 articles, the professor's evaluation is 13 lines." With this lack of merit and carelessness, and furthermore, lack of planning, how difficult it is to deliver a decent evaluation report to our associate professor candidates!

There are work evaluations written like song requests on a napkin. Forgive the analogy. Perfunctory evaluations of hundreds of pages of work, allegations of "ethical violations"... Candidates who can muster the courage despite the warnings of their colleagues end up at a lawyer's office. Then a lawsuit is filed. Courts that see such careless reports cancel the administrative action. And then? Then, because someone did not do their job properly, people who are disliked by these individuals can become associate professors. 

When the applicant is a person of merit, the individual who could not become an associate professor due to these absurd evaluations suffers a loss of time and rights, even if their associate professorship is accepted later. Is this compensated? Of course not. Let's say it is compensated. Who pays this price? All of us. The person who wrote that report neither undergoes an investigation for their carelessness nor contributes to the payment of this compensation. They get away with it. Our young academic, who attains the associate professorship even if late, tries to forget the incident. Turkey is a cheap country. If you are a laborer, if you are an academic, life is expensive, you are cheap, and your labor is cheap. Shame on it!