A NEW set of bylaws that ordered the payment of a number of allowances and bonuses for professors in Saudi universities was approved by the Council of Ministers about five weeks ago. The new bylaws included a 25% teaching allowance, a 20-40% rare specialization allowance, a special allowance for working in the new universities, and end of service payments to those who have served 20 years or more as a professor or a lecturer at the rate of one month's salary for every year's service. It goes without saying that the Council of Ministers in Saudi Arabia is doing its best to improve education in this country. However, the new bylaws have not found favor with many Saudi educators. Those bylaws do not correspond to the new national development plan that King Abdullah has announced. The national development plan calls for the quality improvement of education and needless to say college professors represent the backbone of higher education. Accordingly, any attention given to Saudi faculty will be reflected in their work proficiency especially taking into consideration that the salaries of Saudi college professors are only one third of those of college professors in the other Gulf states. The new bylaws are a huge disappointment to Saudi faculty because there were no provisions for stable increases in the basic monthly salary. Moreover, the newly-approved allowances are not applicable to all Saudi college professors. They are applicable to only a few who can satisfy the requirements of those allowances. The new bylaws, therefore, do not address the minimum requirements and expectations of Saudi faculty. Quite the reverse, the new bylaws have disappointed Saudi faculty and have let them down. The teaching allowance is difficult to apply because of the conditions imposed in its application. Only college professors who teach a full load each semester are eligible for this teaching allowance at the rate of 25 percent of the basic monthly salary. This will create a messy situation because there are no clear-cut rules that guarantee a fair application of this stipulation. Avoiding this messy situation is not too difficult. Why shouldn't all college professors get the 25 percent teaching allowance? They deserve to have it as a salary bonus not a conditional allowance. Furthermore, academic research has not received much attention in the new set of bylaws. Many faculty expect to be rewarded monetarily for the papers they publish in scholarly journals and for the papers they present in conferences. Instead of meeting such legitimate expectations, the new bylaws have ignored the significance of research papers and proposed fiscal rewards for achieving prizes and for those occupying command positions which are, in reality, limited in number and available only for a few specializations. Another point of significance is related to the end of service payments to those who have served 20 years or more as a professor or a lecturer. Surprisingly, the new bylaws did not consider the years of scholarship that those professors and lecturers spent abroad to earn their degrees. Excluding the years of study from the payment requirement makes it difficult for many academics to satisfy the 20 year service condition which means those years were wasted for no return. This decision represents a big question mark especially for those who spent ten years or more abroad and found themselves unrewarded for the time they spent for the sake of earning a degree. Saudi college professors want the end of service payments to take into consideration the time they spent as teaching assistants and the time they spent in pursuing their higher degrees. It seems that the new set of bylaws are contrary to the recommendations of the Shoura Council and contrary to the wishes of thousands of Saudi faculty. The new set of bylaws came as a huge shock to academic circles because they did not consider what hundreds of educators had written about concerning the best methods to enhance the work atmosphere in Saudi universities. Saudi faculty still have hopes that the new bylaws will be revised to include what they ask for. They still hope for a genuine unconditional salary bonus that will make their salaries closer to the salaries of their counterparts in other Gulf states and help them confront the increasing rate of inflation. __
