THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Governor Arif Mohammed Khan has directed the vice-chancellor of the University of Kerala to inquire into a complaint that Higher Education Minister KT Jaleel’s PhD thesis was of “dubious academic merit”.
The governor’s direction came in the wake of a petition submitted by the Save Education Campaign Committee. Jaleel’s PhD thesis was titled ‘(Variamkunnathu) Kunjahammed Haji and Ali Musaliar -- Their Role in the Malabar Rebellion’.
The PhD was awarded to Jaleel in 2006 when MK Ramachandran Nair, who was later accused in the university assistant recruitment scam, was the vice-chancellor. At that time, he was also holding the full charge of the Syndicate. The petition pointed out that the PhD thesis of Jaleel was nothing but “a disordered compendium of quotes” from various sources with very little inferences by the researcher.
“When quotations and excerpts from different sources and references to publications are used in the thesis, it is mandatory that the referred to citations are properly acknowledged. This basic academic convention is not followed in the thesis in question,” it said.
It added that Jaleel’s thesis, which contains 622 quotes in 302 paragraphs without author’s interpretations, breaks all academic limits and leads to plagiarism -- a very serious academic offence. Jaleel registered for research in the university in 2000 while Dr B Ekbal was the vice-chancellor and got it re-registered in 2005 when Ramachandran Nair assumed office as the VC.
The registration with a vague and irrelevant academic objective would have got cancelled had it not been revived for other reasons by the then VC, the petition said.
“Similarly, the submitted thesis, which is an apology for a PhD thesis, would not have been adjudged suitable for the award of the degree had it not been entrusted for evaluation with academics close to the researcher,” Save University Campaign Committee chairperson RS Sasikumar and secretary M Shajarkhan said.