The invisible accomplishments of faculty in Ugandan Universities: An ‘Iceberg Tip Metaphor’

Abstract

The evaluation of faculty accomplishments has remained unresolved and contentious, threatening the quality of all university functions. Whereas performance evaluation of faculty is derived from their mandate of teaching, research, and community service, there has been no comprehensive tool that specifically measures aspects of quality, effectiveness or even commitment. As a result, without a comprehensive and reliable evaluation tool to evaluate faculty members’ performance, institutional quality may suffer, as may faculty enthusiasm, emotional engagement, and commitment, all of which are vulnerable to institutional productivity and visibility. The paper concludes that the lack of a comprehensive tool to measure all faculty activities affected mechanisms to acquire evidence for certain accomplishments. Therefore, Universities must develop a comprehensive tool to capture multiple accomplishments as a basis for performance evaluations to inform personnel decisions that go beyond class time and paper publications in order to restore visibility of fundamental faculty accomplishments.