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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