Going against the tide in Uganda’s higher education: a brief historical account of Uganda Martyrs University

Abstract

Uganda Martyrs University (UMU) was founded in 1993 and was accredited as a private not-for-profit university by the Uganda National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) and chattered in 2005. This paper provides a brief granular historical account of Uganda Martyrs University (UMU), focusing mainly on three units, namely, its Registry, its Faculty of Agriculture, and its Faculty of the Built Environment. These units are purposively selected for their unique contributions to the remarkable journey of UMU over the past thirty years—a story of tenacity of purpose and hope daring decision-making and unconventional partnerships. The early years of UMU, were devoted to setting up the systems and infrastructure of the university, at the core of which the Registry ended up playing many key roles. The role of the Registry kept evolving, with the later years being characterized by expansion and refinement of programmes, policies, and functions of different academic units. The Faculty of Agriculture (FA), on its part, grew from a one diploma- and one degree-awarding programme to a fully-fledged multi-disciplinary undergraduate and postgraduate (master’s and doctoral) faculty, with the largest student cohort since 2000. Finally, the Faculty of the Built Environment (FoBE) evolved to become Uganda’s first-ever architectural programme to address the need to look at the teaching of architecture as a forward-looking field, to addressing future concerns for Environmentally Conscious Design (ECD) as a pertinent issue in built environment education and practice in both local and global contexts. Knitted together the story of these three units of UMU present a brief yet telling account of UMU going against the tide in the country’s higher education landscape in the post-Structural Adjustment dispensation.