Academics as thought leaders

I was happy to be present at the Annual Research Symposium 2015, organized by the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo as the Plenary Speaker. As someone not from medicine, I spoke on 'Academics as thought leaders' highlighting the promises and pitfalls in the Sri Lankan context. Today's column is an essence of what I have shared.

Academics engage in scholarly activities. They deal with knowledge playing multiple roles.

They have to think and act as knowledge creators and knowledge sharers. Academics influence the attitudes and aptitudes of the student community. This is where 'thought leadership' comes to the forefront. Superiority in scientific thinking, blended with socio-cultural realities is what a smart academic should possess. It qualifies them to join the constellation of thought leaders.

In fact, leadership is not about positions and titles but decisions and actions. It refers to a mindset of influencing, inspiring and instructing. Leaders as opposed to laggards, deliver results. As it has been observed, leadership is a vastly explored but least understood phenomena on earth.

The many definitions of leadership portray its multi-dimensional nature. Academics should shift from their perennial plight of 'publishing or perishing' to a new paradigm of thought leadership. Such a transformation needs vision and passion. Overcoming socio-economic and religio-cultural barriers in moving ahead with strong intrinsically-driven motivation is the need of the hour.

Triple roles for academics

Academics have a triple role to play. These can be depicted as a knowledge pyramid of academics. The diagram depicts the details.

The bottom of the knowledge pyramid remains the role of 'knowledge capturer'. This includes the learning dimension of an academic. We learn from the womb to the tomb, as life-long learners. I prefer to be called a management learner than an 'expert'. This is more relevant in the context of change, where knowledge rapidly becomes obsolete. Particularly, in the areas of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT), the rate of knowledge updating seems more rapid.

This is where the academics have to explore new knowledge. They should have the mindset of an explorer. It reminds me of a story that I heard about an elderly professor. He was serving in a residential campus in an European city, staying in the upper-most floor of the building complex.

His room was well lit early morning and the students could see him reading. The students discussed among themselves as to why this veteran still gets up so early to read. One student had the guts to ask him, as to why he does so. The professor gave a profound answer. "I would rather drink from a flowing fountain than from a stale pond".

Upon reflecting, I was wondering whether we Sri Lankan academics are more 'flowing fountains' or 'stale ponds'. We might be hurriedly offering re-cycled knowledge over and again to cater to the ever-increasing demand for lectures. Hence, the knowledge capturing dimension suffers and the opportunity to review and renew oneself is neglected.

The middle part of the knowledge pyramid is all about sharing knowledge. It highlights the traditional role of teaching. Communicating knowledge does not necessarily mean lecturing. We at the Postgraduate Institute of Management (PIM), thanks to the late Prof. Uditha Liyanage, have been practising, what we call the four modes of teaching - 'tell, ask, show and do'.

Telling means the typical lecturing. Asking means to engage the learning community by raising questions expecting answers from them. Showing refers to audio-visual interventions such as documentaries, movie extracts, video recordings, internet-based resources such as You tube. Doing means to get the student community to engage in group discussions. In a typical three-hour 'session' (we prefer this as opposed to a lecture), roughly one third would be telling.

I see clear issues among us, Sri Lankan academics in this respect. Are we loading students with knowledge through a one-way communication, making them mere receivers? They would easily resort to 'parrot technique' in memorizing everything and reproducing it at the exam with spelling and grammar errors.

Are we being challenged by the student community sufficiently, in leading to a meaningful interactive discussion? I might be biased here in basing on mostly post-graduate teaching experience. Yet, irrespective of what level an academic has to tackle, an appropriate adaption is always possible.

This is where research comes to the limelight. Sri Lankan academics should reach the pinnacle of the knowledge pyramid by becoming knowledge creators. Relevant research with rigour and results is the need of the hour.

I recall reading an article written by Dr Jayaratne Pinikahana sometime ago, highlighting the need for the private sector to collaborate in university research. He shared some revealing statistics about local research.

"Sri Lanka contributes only 0.17% of the GDP for research whereas Singapore contributes 2.3%, South Korea 2.9% and China 1.3%. A recent report published by the Ministry of Technology and Research revealed that Sri Lanka has only 287 researchers per million which is less than the world average of 894.

"The average number of researchers per million in the developed world and the developing world is 3,272 and 374. It is clear from these statistics that the Sri Lankan situation is worse than the average third world situation. The most alarming situation is that it has got worse in recent years. For example, in 1996, Sri Lanka had 6,000 full-time researchers including university researchers but by 2006 this number declined to 4,200."

In such a context, any move to strengthen research rigour, particularly among the University community is commendable. There is a clear need to create better awareness on the importance of research. This I see acutely in the field of management.

We need to explore this topic further. The next column will add more insights into academics as thought leaders.

Prof. Ajantha Dharmasiri can be reached through [email protected] or www.ajanthadharmasiri.info