Pro-government media reported on Sunday, June 2, that public universities are experiencing a continuous shortage of teaching staff across various disciplines.
The newspaper Al-Watan mentioned that the efforts of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research to address the shortage of teaching staff are still below the required level, amid the refusal of thousands of teaching assistants to return to the country, as well as the significant migration of teaching faculty to neighbouring countries or private universities in search of a better income.
Among the attempts to address this issue, the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research and the Teachers’ Union have called for “treating teaching staff members the same as their colleagues in medical colleges (medicine, dentistry, and pharmacy) regarding military service. Since 2021, the Ministry of Defense has been assigning doctors and pharmacists directly to hospitals due to the urgent need for their presence there.”
According to the newspaper, despite the Teachers’ Union confirming the existence of a presidential decree stipulating that teaching staff members can perform their military service while working at their universities, these professors are being sent to military camps for three months.
Several teaching staff members complained that being away from their universities for three months would significantly affect the work of the faculties, as “a faculty member will not be able to prepare exam questions, correct thousands of papers, and supervise graduation projects, thereby impacting students for an entire year, especially since the law requires faculty members to be part of examination committees.”
In March, Issam al-Takrouri, a law professor at Damascus University, explained that a university professor’s salary barely covers transportation costs, noting at the time that many instructors in certain disciplines have migrated from the public education sector to the private education sector.
This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
