Academic Staff Capacity in Private Universities in Tanzania

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to critically examine the capacity of academic staff to carry out university teaching, research and community service functions. The findings revealed that there is cheating of academic qualifications among academic staff in private universities. Such an unfortunate practice prevails as there are no strictly enforced recruitment criteria like those in public universities for academic job applicants, thereby adversely affecting their capacity to carry out their core functions. It was also revealed that academic staff names appeared on different university payrolls and surprisingly on such "double" payrolls the academic staff appeared as full-time academic staff. The paper recommends that the recruitment process should be strictly supervised and transparent to ensure that academic staff were recruited and allocated a workload on the basis of genuine academic qualifications and merit.  Key words: recruitment, payroll, transparent, workload, qualifications, merit.