Unqualified persons posing as professors: UGC clarifies who is a ‘Prof’

The issue of unqualified individuals posing as professors came up recently when the University Grants Commission (UGC) came before the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE).

COPE Chair Ranjith Bandara, who was a Professor of Economics at the University of Colombo, told UGC Chairman Prof. Sampath Amaratunge that some individuals claim to be professors though they had only held the position at a university for two months. He asked the UGC chief as to who could actually claim to be a professor.

Prof. Amaratunge noted that a professorship was a post and not everyone could use it after they retired or resigned from a university. He said the UGC had issued a circular detailing the criteria that must be met for a person to refer to himself or herself as a professor postretirement or resignation. A university’s senate, after examining the individual’s service to academia, has to approve the request for him or her to be given the position of Emeritus Professor, which entitles them to be referred to as a professor for life. That honour had been granted only to a handful, he noted.

“Before coming here, I phoned the Registrar of Colombo University and asked him if I could refer to you as Professor,” the UGC Chairman confessed to the COPE Chair. “He said I could. I then asked him if I could refer to Prof. G.L. Peiris as Professor and he said that too was fine as you are both Emeritus Professors.”

Prof. Amaratunge said he needed to be sure about whom to address correctly as a professor as he has seen how government officials who come before parliamentary committees address some MPs as professors though they clearly did not have the qualifications to be referred to as such. These individuals also did not try to correct the officials and continued to pretend that they were indeed professors, he added.

COPE recommended that the UGC introduce a procedure rule detailing who could hold certain academic titles.