Functional pathology of autonomous campuses of Tehran public universities

Regarding the fact that higher education is one of the prominent social institutions whose functions and malfunctions have significant consequences on human societies, According to that since 2012, autonomous campuses are responsible for the mission and the function of higher education and the importance of this issue, therefore this research have been done with the goal of investigation and functional pathology of campuses in three dimension of (instruction, research, expertise services) and the long-term consequences of these damages.

For this purpose with the targeted sampling method was done a semi-structured deep interview with 21 member of higher education experts and autonomous campuses managers of the Tehran’s state universities. This research is qualitative, a kind of inductive reasoning and in terms of method is descriptive-exploration, for data analyzing was used of thematic analysis and functional damage themes are extracted.

The result of the interview analysis was extraction of 97 codes in form of 3 main components and 6 subcomponents. 58 of the codes or 60 percent of them were related to function harms in education dimensions including decline in the quality of training process, decline in the quality of learning process and the lack of rapport between professor and student. 19 codes representing 20 percent of the extracted codes from the interviews were related to the function harms in research dimensions, including poor quality of research and the disregarding students’ projects. 9 codes accounting for 9 percent of the extracted codes were related to function harms in specific services, resulting from lack of communication among the campus, industry and other sectors of the society. 11 codes representing 11 percent of the extracted codes were related to the long-term consequences of function harms of the campuses including the drop in quality of academic level of students entering the campus, the epidemic orientation towards getting academic degree, the drop in research quality, sole attention to education product, giving priority to quantity over quality, the drop in quality of academic level of graduate students, the absence of science production, and lowered level of scientific and academic position.

it is expected that instead of accepting more and more students and prioritizing quantity over quality, the authorities should make an attempt to monitor and assess the educational and research function of these campuses meticulously and do their best to reduce and alleviate these harms. Ignoring such important issues can lead to irrecoverable harms to higher education in Iran nationally and internationally.