A reasonable dream of a social scient student!

It is not surprising to find most vice-chancellors of Tamil Nadu belonging to Science streams. Very rarely we find it otherwise. The reason is quite straight - Their profiles are truly richer than their social science counterparts for no fault of the latter.

 

Some main reasons include; 

Science faculty publications: 

• More number of articles are being published by science stream faculty because number of journals available is more when compared to their social science streams 
• Journals prefer publishing empirical research than opinionated, analytical, descriptive, content-oriented and articulated ones as being carried out by social scientists.
• The impact factor and h-index and similar credits are therefore easily scored by the faculty of science. 
• Science being "only factual", the takers and readers are readily and uniformly available across the world - not the case for social science. 
• The association between scholars are easier for the above reasons and therefore the network is far more visible and wider.

Funds and Projects:

    As the number of publications is more for science professors, it is quite natural that they are more likely to receive funds and get approved of their projects with good flow of funds. 

Number of research scholars:

    With a good number of projects and continuous flow of funds in the hands of a guide, there is likely to be a continuous inward and outward movement of scholars thereby enriching the guide's resume with more number of scholars awarded Ph.D.  

Patents: 

How is this ever possible for a social scientist!!!!! 

 

Above these, there is always a stereotypical perspective that science departments, faculty members and students are superior. Unfortunately the fact is that the labs of science faculty are confined to walls and are kept in control by them by all means; whereas the whole society turns out to be the lab for social scientists. The latter is responsible for running governments across. Nothing can exist without an economist and a political scientist, to say the least.

In order to have better respect in the society, it has to start from higher educational institutions. A visionary from social science department in the top post could bring this change that would bring respect along. Not only respect, but also a hope to expand research, to apply theories real-time and to prove that they are in no way inferior to the "science" stream faculties. This change is much needed. Though this pattern is common in other parts of India and the world, it seems to be far fetched dream here.