Not every professor should be asked to score goals

As July 31 approached, thousands of faculty members in state universities and colleges all over the country performed the same quiet ritual – opening old filing cabinets, requesting certifications, printing journal articles, retrieving student evaluations and arranging certificates in thick folders. Every document represents years of work. Every point may determine whether we move up one rank or remain where we are.

I am one of those faculty members. Yet while organizing decades of evidence into neat piles, I found myself thinking not about universities, but about football.

I think about the player named Josimar José Évora Dias, known to football fans simply as Vozinha. Wearing Cape Verde’s iconic No. 1 jersey at the FIFA World Cup, he stood before millions of viewers as the last line of defense for one of football’s smallest nations. Cape Verde, a country of barely half a million people, was never expected to challenge the world’s traditional powers. Yet against eventual champion Spain, the island nation produced one of the tournament’s most memorable performances by earning a draw.

When the match ended, nobody asked why Vozinha had failed to score. Nobody criticized him for staying inside the penalty area. The world celebrated him precisely because he understood his role and fulfilled it brilliantly.

Football has always understood something that many organizations eventually forget – that great teams are built through specialization. Strikers score goals. Midfielders create opportunities. Defenders stop attacks. Goalkeepers prevent defeat. Their responsibilities are different, but their value is equal. Teams succeed because players perform different roles exceptionally well.

That lesson stayed with me as I reviewed the DBM-CHED Joint Circular governing faculty rank reclassification. The framework evaluates faculty members in four key areas – teaching, research or creative work, extension and professional development. At the lower faculty ranks, teaching appropriately receives the greatest emphasis, accounting for half of the total evaluation. Research and extension each receive one-fifth of the score, while professional development accounts for the remaining 10 percent.

As faculty members rise through the professorial ranks, however, the balance changes. Teaching declines to 40 percent while research increases to 30 percent. Extension remains fixed at 20 percent and professional development stays at 10 percent. In other words, the higher one climbs in academia, the more the evaluation system shifts toward research productivity.

The rationale is understandable. Universities want their senior professors to produce new knowledge, improve rankings and contribute to global scholarship.

What deserves discussion, however, is not whether research matters. It certainly does. The question is whether the balance reflects the many ways professors contribute to a university’s mission.

Why should extension remain permanently fixed at 20 percent regardless of rank? If universities increasingly emphasize societal impact, community engagement, technology transfer and public service, should extension not become more valuable as faculty members gain greater expertise and experience?

Likewise, why does professional development remain only 10 percent throughout an academic career? Senior professors spend decades earning advanced degrees, completing specialized training, obtaining certifications, developing international networks and acquiring professional expertise that ultimately benefits students and institutions alike. Those investments shape the quality of teaching, research and extension, yet they receive the smallest share of the evaluation.

My own journey into academia has been anything but conventional. I dropped out of college at 19 and spent the next 36 years in journalism and public relations. I worked as a reporter, editor, photographer, author and communication executive.

At 47, I returned to college. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I accepted an invitation to teach as an online faculty member at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Open University. At 53, I completed my master’s degree. Last year, I became a full-time faculty member. This year, at 56, I am preparing to receive my PhD.

As I assembled the documents required for reclassification, I could not help but wonder how universities define excellence.

Some professors transform lives inside the classroom. Students remember them decades later because they made difficult ideas understandable and inspired confidence where there was once uncertainty. Others devote themselves to research, patiently generating knowledge that advances their disciplines and strengthens the reputation of their institutions.

Some dedicate their careers to extension work, bringing university expertise into communities where it improves lives in tangible ways. Still others arrive from distinguished professional careers. They bring decades of experience that cannot be learned from textbooks alone. Their classrooms become richer because theory constantly meets practice. None of these contributions diminishes the others. They complement one another.

Yet faculty evaluation increasingly risks encouraging a different message: that every professor should become the academic equivalent of an all-around footballer. The gradual shift in the scoring system sends a subtle signal that research becomes increasingly important as academic careers advance. That may strengthen universities in one dimension, but it may also unintentionally undervalue equally important contributions that are harder to measure through journal publications alone.

The strongest universities are not those filled with identical professors. They are those that assemble complementary talents into one academic community.

Research should continue to be rewarded. Teaching should remain central. Extension should receive the recognition it deserves. Professional growth should not become an afterthought. Most importantly, evaluation systems should acknowledge that excellence is not always expressed in the same proportions.

Football learned long ago that championships are won because different players perform different roles with excellence. Higher education may discover that its greatest strength lies in the very same truth.

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Junep Ocampo is a faculty member of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Open University System.