From suspicion to cynicism: how faculty experience academic promotion

Academic promotion is supposed to be the clearest meritocratic mechanism in a university: publish, teach, serve, and rise. A new study from Makerere University, Uganda’s oldest and most prominent higher education institution, suggests that the reality as experienced by faculty members is far murkier. In research published in SN Social Sciences, Eutychus Ngotho Gichuru of the College of Education and External Studies and Archangel Byaruhanga Rukooko of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences examined how academics across disciplines and career stages cognitively interpret the promotion process, and found a trajectory that runs from initial suspicion to entrenched cynicism.

The study drew on in-depth narratives from 33 faculty members at Makerere, using a hermeneutic approach rooted in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur and anchored in Social Practice Theory. Rather than treating promotion as a technical exercise governed by published criteria, the researchers framed it as an interpretive practice, one whose meaning is constructed by the people moving through it. Their analysis identified three cognitive movements that structure faculty members’ experiences: prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration.

Prefiguration describes the stage before faculty members engage formally with promotion, when their expectations are shaped by what the authors call an institutional shadow text. This is the unwritten companion to the official policy documents, the accumulated lore about how promotion really works, which conditions academics to approach the process with suspicion before they have submitted a single file. The official policy on appointment and promotion of academic staff, first issued in 2006 and reviewed in 2014, exists on paper, but the narratives collected by the researchers suggest that faculty members read the institution through a second, informal document written in rumor and precedent.

Configuration is the stage at which the process is emplotted through narration. As faculty members live through promotion, they assemble the changing criteria, opaque decision-making, and perceived patronage into coherent stories. The study emphasizes that these are perceptions and narratives rather than established institutional facts; the authors deliberately positioned the research as an examination of how Ugandan higher education practitioners understand terms like institutional patronage, not as an audit of whether patronage exists at the research sites. Even so, the stories faculty members told shared a recognizable plot: criteria that shifted over time, decisions that could not be traced to stated standards, and informal influence that seemed to matter as much as formal merit.

Refiguration is the aftermath, the point at which the interpreted experience reorganizes the interpreter. Faculty members who had moved through the process emerged with feelings of cynicism, strategic compliance, and a lack of trust for the institution. Strategic compliance is a particularly telling outcome: rather than open resistance or wholehearted endorsement, academics adopt a pragmatic posture, performing what the system demands while privately disbelieving in it. The disjuncture between policy and practice, the authors argue, is wide enough that compliance becomes a survival strategy rather than an expression of conviction.

The theoretical machinery behind these findings is worth unpacking. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics treats human action as a text to be interpreted, and his account of narrative in Time and Narrative provides the tripartite structure the authors borrow. Prefiguration corresponds to the horizon of expectations that precedes action, configuration to the act of emplotment that gives events a narrative shape, and refiguration to the way the completed narrative transforms the reader’s world. Applied to promotion, this means that faculty members do not simply undergo a procedure; they author an account of it, and that account then governs how they relate to the university thereafter.

Social Practice Theory supplies the second pillar. Practices, in the sense developed by theorists such as Theodore Schatzki, Elizabeth Shove, and Andreas Reckwitz, are routinized doings and sayings that carry meaning, competence, and materiality. Promotion at Makerere is thus analyzed as a social practice whose elements, published criteria, committees, files, informal networks, and stories, are assembled and reassembled by participants. This framing connects the study to a broader literature on audit culture and performativity in universities, including work by Stephen Ball on the terrors of performativity and by Cris Shore and Susan Wright on rankings and the reassembling of society, as well as to scholarship on academic capitalism and metric assemblages such as the h-index.

The Ugandan setting gives the analysis a distinctive Global South dimension. Makerere has been a central institution in East African intellectual life, and its reforms during the neoliberal era were the subject of Mahmood Mamdani’s influential study Scholars in the Marketplace. The new research engages decolonial scholarship as well, citing figures such as Paulin Hountondji, Achille Mbembe, Walter Mignolo, and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni on epistemic freedom and the cognitive empire. In this context, promotion is not merely an administrative bottleneck but a site where questions of recognition, authority, and whose knowledge counts are negotiated in practice.

Methodologically, the study is a qualitative narrative inquiry. The authors collected rich, in-depth narratives across disciplines and career stages, with sample size guided by the concept of information power rather than statistical saturation, following Malterud and colleagues. Thematic analysis was used to identify the cognitive movements that recur across accounts. Ethical safeguards were extensive: approval came from the higher degrees and research committee of the East African School of Higher Education Studies and Development, participants gave informed consent, pseudonyms were assigned, transcripts were anonymized, and quotes were scrutinized to remove identifying information in what the authors describe as an emotionally sensitive institutional environment. The data are not publicly available due to ethical restrictions, though anonymized excerpts appear in the article.

The study’s significance lies less in any single accusation than in its reframing of promotion as an interpretive experience. If faculty members’ trust is built or eroded through the stories they construct about how the institution recognizes merit, then transparency in criteria and decision-making is not just good administration but a condition for institutional legitimacy. The authors present their claims as perceptions and narratives, carefully hedged, yet the pattern they document, suspicion conditioned by a shadow text, emplotment through opacity and perceived patronage, and refiguration into cynicism and strategic compliance, offers a technical vocabulary for a problem familiar to universities far beyond Kampala: the gap between the meritocracy a promotion policy promises and the practice its faculty narrate.

Subject of Research: Faculty perceptions of the academic promotion process at Makerere University

Article Title: From suspicion to cynicism

Article References: Gichuru, E. N., & Rukooko, A. B. (2026). From suspicion to cynicism. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 403. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01693-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01693-1

Keywords: academic promotion, Makerere University, hermeneutics, Ricoeur, Social Practice Theory, faculty experiences, higher education, Uganda, qualitative research, narrative inquiry, Global South, organizational trust