Within the framework of the investigation in course, Autonomy and legitimacy of the higher education in Latin America, compared study, that moves forward a group of professors of the National University of Colombia, the analysis of the incidence that the policies and practices of the teaching evaluation have had in the autonomy and the legitimacy of the public universities, constitutes the central topic of this presentation.

The multiplicity of functions that the society of ends of the century attributed to the public universities generated some contradictions that typified three types of crisis: of hegemony, of legitimacy and of institution (Santos, 2006) that affect the university autonomy, the one that can be tracked around two axes of tension: the production of social and “societales” senses or the formation of the work force and the generation of cognitive merchandise (Múnera, 2008). From this frame of analysis, one looks to characterize how the evaluation and the accreditation affect the autonomy and the legitimacy in some universities of the region.

The “compulsion of the evaluation” as a characteristic character of the present policies of the modernization tied to the financing practices, disarticulated to its interior, with a technical and little conceptual vision and in which its pedagogical dimension has been cancelled (Diaz-Barriga, 2008:30 - 31), has turned into a fetish to the evaluation at the public universities (Granovsky, 2003), inasmuch as it is used more as an instrument of information and control that as a part of processes of individual improvement, collective and institutional (Rodriguez, 2008). In order to legitimize and to respond to the exigencies of the market and the authorities, the public university resorts to an increasing refinement of the information that provides, adjusting to external requirements and thus losing its autonomy. The evaluation of teaching does not escape to this dynamics. When concentrating mainly in labor and economic aspects of the relations between the natural people and the institutions, the processes and the contents, are oriented towards a valuation of the individual without constituting a significant contribution for the personal and institutional development. In like manner, when separating the evaluation of teaching from the integral evaluation of the other academic, institutional and citizen functions of the university professors does not contribute to making the valuation of the performance a vital subject for professors and universities; but, on the contrary, it worsens the segmentations that the State and the demand have already caused and have turned it into an empty ritual (Rodriguez, 2008).

Teaching evaluation, autonomy, legitimacy, public university.