Sunday, October 28, 2012

Message to UPLB-CA 5 Years Ago


Reiterating a Message
Close to five years ago, on March 6, 2008, when I was Faculty Regent of UP, I gave a message before officials and alumni of the College of Agriculture during its foundation day at the college’s foundation site.  I wish to reprint here my message then because I find the issues I raised still highly relevant even if some have been partially overtaken by time and events.  I have taken the liberty to insert some of my current comments (parenthetically) on certain issues as I see them now.  Let me reprint my message (after the proper salutations, of course), as follows:

Let me take the liberty to express at length my own perspective on the theme of the 99th foundation day of the College of Agriculture, a journey through a hundred years and beyond.  Needless to say, one hundred years of journey is a long and possibly tiring journey, but the prospects of seeing the journey beyond these past hundred years, I feel, is reinvigorating enough and should prepare us for another hundred years of journey, perhaps at a different level and dimension.

Less one from a hundred years ago today, a tent borrowed from the US Army was raised nearby in what is now known as Camp Eldridge.  That tent served as the first official building of the first among three original colleges established under the University of the Philippines.  That was the UP College of Agriculture, comprised of five American teachers and seven Filipino pensionados who became the first Filipino students of agriculture.  For those who would want a more detailed history of the UP College of Agriculture, I recommend strongly that you sit down with Dr. Nanding Bernardo, now the acknowledged historian of the UP College of Agriculture after working on those massive volumes last year under the auspices of the UPLB Alumni Association.  Better still, buy the books from Dean Ides Adalla.

Sixty-four years later in 1972, the UP College of Agriculture was at its prime and was acknowledged the best agricultural school in Southeast Asia.   During that time, due to a number of interesting historical footnotes that are now relegated to the pages of history, the UP College of Agriculture, instead of separating from the University of the Philippines, became the first Autonomous Campus when UP was transformed into a system of multi-campus university giving rise to UP Los Baños.  The College of Agriculture gave up many of her children to become the new colleges of the new university even as it remained a college itself. 

The department of agricultural economics is now the College of Economics and Management, the department of agricultural engineering is the now College of Engineering and Agro-Industrial Technology, the department of humanities is now the College of Arts and Sciences, the department of home technology is now the College of Human Ecology, the department of agricultural information and communication is now the College of Development Communication, and the Graduate Studies Program is now the Graduate School.  The College of Agriculture, however, remained the College of Agriculture albeit a weakened college of agriculture that continued to pursue its goals in instruction, research, and extension.

Today, 26 years after that historic transformation, we have a revered institution with a rich tradition of excellence, relevance, integrity and strength of academic character being challenged by globally-oriented factors.  For example, the College of Agriculture has practically relinquished its leadership position among colleges of agriculture in Southeast Asia even if it may still have retained its leadership position among colleges of agriculture in the country.   And even within the country, we must admit that there are now colleges of agriculture out there wanting to take the place of our own College of Agriculture.  We have to respond to these developments and respond with confidence.

As I am a proud alumnus of the UP College of Agriculture who happens to have been observing the changes in the environment within which the College of Agriculture has had to contend with over the years, I am bravely offering to the College of Agriculture my unsolicited observations and doable suggestions to respond to a changing environment. 

In the last couple of decades, we have seen strong colleges of agriculture in various state universities around the country grow and develop.  For some reason they have been highly successful in generating resources.  We can pat our own backs for this because it was the College of Agriculture that trained the leaders of these institutions.  But today we find ourselves practically competing with these smaller colleges of agriculture.  This is a level of academic standing I simply cannot accept.  The UPLB College of Agriculture must not compete with every little college of agriculture out there.  We in the UPLB College of Agriculture must lead the way.  We are the leaders, not the competitors or followers.

How do we regain our leadership position in agricultural education in this country and perhaps the region?  Let us take stock of what we have and can do, and let us refocus.

First, we have the intellectual might.  The UPLB College of Agriculture is the intellectual giant in agriculture in this country, and perhaps even in the Southeast Asian region (we have actually lost grip of this).  We may not have as much physical and financial resources as others do, but we have the intellectual resource, which, I tend to believe, we may have been using more for personal pursuits rather than for institutional growth and development.  This is not necessarily bad for we, as individuals, need to gain enriching experiences from time to time.  But let us not forsake the institution that brought us where we are today.  Where is that Los Baños Spirit that we have always bragged about?

Second, let us refocus.  Knowing where we are now, let us define where we want to be as a College of Agriculture perhaps five decades down the road.  On this issue, there are four things we might want to consider. 

1.      Agriculture has become an extremely wide and level playing field today compared to what it was years ago.  The science itself may not have changed drastically, but certainly the influential factors have increased and the scope of competition has widened.  We can no longer focus too tightly on our own limited community-based system of small-scale production because the production of food has become a huge global system and enterprise.  We need to expand our horizons, we need to adjust our periscopes, we need to be much more comprehensive in our thinking and conception of what our concerns are in the area of food systems.

2.      Our deep understanding of the changing food systems enterprise must lead to a drastic rethinking of our academic programs.  For example, the agricultural curriculum has not changed much in the last 50 years.  And yet, agricultural science has drastically changed.  Our curriculum no longer reflects accurately the needs of our society, and our own perception of our graduates has become rather myopic.  All others being equal, we want to train all our students to become scientists.  This is not supposed to be.  We would be doing this country good, and our students greater service, if we refocus our curriculum into one that is generalist oriented rather than specialist oriented.  Specialization should be pursued at the higher levels of training, not at the fundamental level.  In other words, in the field of agriculture, let us go back to basics.

3.      While we are on the topic, I dare raise a question now.  Must we tenaciously cling onto the concept of a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture?  Of course, it is difficult to part with this because we all grew up on it.  I have a BSA myself.  But we have been reminded by the popular American folk singer Bob Dylan that the times, they are a changing.  If you ask me, let the other colleges of agriculture continue offering their BSAs, but the UPLB College of Agriculture might do well rethinking such title.  Why, for example, can’t we think in terms of a simple Bachelor of Science?  I invite our leaders in the field of agricultural education to at least consider the merits of the idea.  Open it up for serious discourse and let us see where that leads us.

4.      I would like to propose that the UPLB College of Agriculture takes the lead in an effort to revolutionize agricultural education in this country, once and for all.  I am talking of a single sliding curriculum for all agricultural schools in the country – a national agricultural curriculum, if you will.  Let me explain what I mean by a sliding curriculum.  This curriculum is like a spectrum, where at one end we would be training a technician and at the other end we would be training a scientist.  In-between would be various orientations.  Those students who would want to become scientists could locate themselves at the end of the spectrum where scientists are trained.  Necessarily, this is the end of the curriculum spectrum that could be very highly demanding intellectually.  Those who would see themselves as teachers of agricultural science could probably locate themselves in the middle of the curricular spectrum, and so on and so forth.  In each of these orientations there would be a sequence of appropriate courses so designed to make such orientation as strong as it ought to be.  The point is, there would be only one curriculum to be implemented by all agricultural schools in the country so that we have complete control of quality of agricultural education and quality of graduates no matter what school one might graduate from.  Under this scheme, we should no longer be concerned about keeping quality standards across institutions because there would only be one curriculum and one standard, and the institutions offering agricultural programs today would simply locate themselves along the curricular spectrum depending on where their respective strengths might be.  Those who decide that they can offer the curriculum focusing on the training of scientists must have the intellectual and physical resources to do so.  Consequently, we would have specialized institutions offering specific foci of the national curricular spectrum.  I know this is not going to be easy, but I also know that this is doable and appropriate to the conditions in this country. 

My colleagues in the UPLB College of Agriculture, we are not here just to     commemorate the founding of our Alma Matter because that is no longer the issue.  We are here to take stock of what we have done and of what we can still do while we are still able to do so.  Let us not leave this to the coming generations because that would take much longer time on top of the fact that that would be tantamount to abdicating our responsibility to future generations of agriculture scholars.  Let us do now what we have to do now. 

It would be unfortunate to all of us here if we have to repeat to our young crop of colleagues what an admired but exasperated mentor, the late national scientist and father of modern-day UPLB, Dr. Dioscoro Umali, once told his audience of graduates in Diliman years back, be the heroes we failed to become.

My colleagues, I seek your indulgence for these ramblings, but I am now waiting at the departure lounge and I wish to be part of a significant rebirth of the institution that trained me so well to be professional and academic.  I wish to witness this rebirth before I board my flight.

Quite candidly, from the time I delivered this message on March 6, 2008, I haven’t observed any effort towards regaining our lost glory in the field of agricultural science.  I had hoped some colleagues in the UPLB-CA listened to the message then because I delivered it as Faculty Regent.  Now, I’m sorry to say that the universities in the region that used to be behind the UPLB College of Agriculture (those that used to send their faculty to Los Baños for training) are today decades ahead of us in terms of prestige and resources.  Not to mention expertise.  I’m not forsaking my Alma Mater, but I’m asking, “what have we done to deserve this sort of tail-end ranking among our peers (actually, our students) in the region?”

I have very serious doubts that the leadership of the College of Agriculture would wish to listen to the ramblings of an old, retired faculty member but I hope the message is reviewed by our colleagues in UPLB-CA in preparation for another foundation day celebration in March 2013, about four months from now.  I feel it still makes some sense today as it did almost five years ago.
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