Five more resign at Unitech
By FRANK RAI
FIVE more lecturers from the University of Technology (Unitech) in Lae have resigned since Monday.
Three resigned over the weekend.
There are now 26 lecturers who left in the past six months.
Amongst them were two doctorate (PhD) holders in mining engineering and a long-serving senior lecturer from the Applied Science department.
While they tendered their resignations, they said they were leaving as they could not work under the current administration and council because they had no confidence in them.
The academics said they would not stand by and see unfair treatment, nepotism, corruption and malpractices at Unitech.
The academics included mining and engineering academics Dr William Tongamp and Dr David Saing, long-serving lecturer Michael Kiap from the Applied Science department, Boaz Andrew and Sipa Benny of the Mathematics and Computer Science department.
“The university is drastically affected now. We are here to teach but our minds are not steady and we cannot perform well,” a lecturer said.
Sources said Unitech was losing highly qualified and well-experienced lecturers in a short time.
“Some of these lecturers will be hard to replace and there will be a vacuum in the departments,” a staff member said.
They said the resignation of Mr Benny was a “blow” to the computer science programme.
“There were only three lecturers for the computer science course and with Mr Benny’s resignation, there would only be two left,” the source said.
Resigned lecturers have lost internet and email privileges even when their effective dates were still far off.
They said this was against their rights to free speech and expression.
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