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Jakarta Post

Government aims to attract foreign lecturers

The government has decided to open wider the window of opportunity for foreign academics to become permanent lecturers at universities across the country in a bid to raise Indonesia’s higher education quality to international standards

Marguerite Afra Sapiie and Wahyoe Boediwardhana (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta/Surabaya
Wed, April 11, 2018

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Government aims to attract foreign lecturers

T

he government has decided to open wider the window of opportunity for foreign academics to become permanent lecturers at universities across the country in a bid to raise Indonesia’s higher education quality to international standards.

The move followed a recent presidential regulation (Perpres) signed by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo on the recruitment of foreign workers, which aims to ease the licensing of the particular foreign workers the country needs most, including those who work in the education sector.

Based on the Perpres, the Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry is currently preparing a supporting regulation to ease the bureaucracy for foreign lecturers, including the possibility of issuing a new type of visa for them.

The ministry’s director general for technology and higher education resources, Ali Ghufron Mukti, said it aimed to attract foreign lecturers with especially high qualifications, in the hope that they might contribute to the country’s academic and scientific progress.

“We want to strengthen collaboration [with foreign academics], which in turn will also improve the quality of our local lecturers and academic work […] such as joint supervision, research and publications,” Ghufron told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

The ministry will prioritize lecturers who are qualified in science, technology, engineering and mathematics because those were the majors deemed most relevant to Indonesia’s goal of inspiring industrial innovation for the wider purpose of development.

Currently, Ghufron went on to say, foreign academics were only allowed short-term lecturing contracts in Indonesian universities using research permits or through the ministry’s Visiting World Class Professorship program. The program, in which world-class professors are invited to become visiting lecturers and collaborate with local academics, is part of the government’s efforts to boost local research.

According to 2016-2017 statistics in the databank of the Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry, there are a total of 237,837 lecturers in 3,276 universities across Indonesia, most of whom are lecturers with master’s degrees. Only 21,872 lecturers, less than 10 percent, have obtained doctorate degrees.

The ministry’s director for human resources qualification Mukhlas Ansori said the new policy aimed at raising the academic bar in the country.

“We actually have adequate numbers of lecturers in the prioritized majors. [However we] intend [to attract] lecturers whose qualifications exceed current benchmarks in our universities,” he said, adding that the ministry was currently drafting the details of the policy, including on the qualifications of the foreign lecturers.

Research, Technology and Higher Education Minister Mohamad Nasir had said that foreign lecturers from countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and the United States had expressed their interest in working at Indonesian universities.

Separately, the Law and Human Rights Ministry’s Directorate General of Immigration spokesperson, Agung Sampurno, said that discussion involving relevant ministries regarding a special visa for foreign lecturers was still ongoing. The discussion suggested that visas for foreign lecturers would be valid for as long as their working contracts.

“For example, if [the lecturer] signs a five-year contract, the visa will also be valid for five years,”
he said.

He went on to say that the Law and Human Rights Ministry would draft the new visa regulation into either a new or existing regulation within the ministry.

The rector of the Surabaya Institute of Technology (ITS) in East Java, Joni Hermana, welcomed the government’s plan, saying the campus management had long awaited such a policy.

“This will encourage our lecturers to improve their qualifications,” he said, adding that it was in line with the university’s goal of transforming into a world-class university.

The ITS currently employs fewer than 30 foreign lecturers, who teach on a temporary basis. However, education expert with the Indonesian Education University (UPI), Said Hamid Hasan, said that employing foreign lecturers in Indonesia would not necessarily improve the quality of higher education, since the underlying problem was that Indonesian lecturers did not enjoy the facilities and support that were provided by foreign universities or governments for their lecturers.

“Employing foreign lecturers, whether temporarily or permanently, will not improve quality as long as the [local] lecturers are not treated similarly,” Hamid said, adding that the government must pay attention to the welfare of lecturers.

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