Cambodian lecturers’ pursuit of academic excellence: expectations vs. reality

ABSTRACT

The academic profession in Cambodia has been under growing pressure to pursue excellence in higher education. Nonetheless, various interpretations of what constitutes excellence persist across the public and private sectors, as lecturers follow disparate goals in teaching and research at various jobs and institutions. For many, the diversity of perspectives creates ambiguity and unclear directions for translating academic excellence into quality contribution to social development in the country. This paper illustrates how multiple interpretations and concerns create challenges, inhibiting progress of the Cambodian academic profession and society at large. Qualitative data from national policy papers, personal observations, focus group and expert interviews, were engaged to shed light on the intricacies of competing priorities, and the deficiencies of institutional and systemic support for the scholarly aspirations of the local faculty. The findings in this paper indicate that the lecturers’ limited capacity for intellectually-stimulating scholarship is often coupled with their own hesitation about committing themselves to inquiry-oriented academic work. This study argues that policies on advancing academic excellence can be effective only when the quest for excellence in service is well-matched with enhanced quality of intellectual engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic excellence
• academic profession
• higher education
• Cambodia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The university system has been expanding dramatically since 1997, witnessing an increase from eight public higher education institutions and around 1,000 students in 1995, to 48 public and 73 private institutions and 217,840 students in 2016 (Chealy, 2009; Clayton & Ngoy, 1997; MoEYS, 2017). The majority of students enrol in private programs offered by both public and private universities (World Bank, 2012).

2. With the rising importance of English, many students are taking a degree in English concurrently with their other degree (Howes & Ford, 2011; Peou, 2017).

3. Given limited state funding, most public and private universities are in intensive competition in certain fields, such as English training, business, and computer science, as they mainly rely on student fees as the source of their income (Pit & Ford, 2004; Un & Sok, 2018).

4. These codes are not without reproach. For example, in the absence of a classification framework for academic employment status in Cambodia (see Un et al., 2017), we found it difficult to track down publicly-accessible information on the number of lecturers’ full-time and part-time jobs and institutional affiliations.

5. Female academics tended to renege on appointments more often because of competing obligations.

6. See also Ros and Oleksiyenko (2018).

7. All employing universities are located in Phnom Pehn. All private universities in the sample were established after 2000. In 2018, the public university enrolled approx. 12,000 students and charged undergraduate tuition fees in the amount of approx. USD$2,000. Meanwhile, the private universities’ enrolment ranged from 4,000 to 24,000 students, paying tuition fees in the range of USD$1,600 to USD$2,500.

8. The starting year of employment at the university listed on the left.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee [General Research Fund (GRF) #17665816];University of Hong Kong [HKU Seed Fund for Basic Research #201509159026].

Notes on contributors

Anatoly Oleksiyenko

Anatoly Oleksiyenko is a scholar of international higher education. He holds PhD in Theory and Policy Studies of Higher Education from the University of Toronto. He is currently Associate Professor of Higher Education at the HKU Faculty of Education. His research focuses on governance challenges in global higher education as well as on international student mobility. He has published on these topics in such journals as Higher Education, Higher Education Policy, Minerva, Studies in Higher Education, and Tertiary Education and Management. He is also the author of the book “Global Mobility and Higher Learning” (Routledge, 2018) and the lead editor of the book “International Status Anxiety and Higher Education: The Soviet Legacy in China and Russia” (CERC-Springer, 2018).

Vutha Ros

Vutha Ros has been a researcher in higher education since assuming a faculty position at Department of English, Institute of Foreign Languages, Royal University of Phnom Penh in 2010. He is currently pursuing a PhD Degree in Higher Education at the Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong. His research is centred on academic profession, research capacity building, and leadership and management in higher education, and blended learning in higher education.