Academic hypocrisy

BY ANTONIO CONTRERAS         FEBRUARY 14, 2019

THESE are the same people who virtually manhandled Ilocos Norte Gov. Imee Marcos for falsely claiming that she had a Princeton degree.

And they are the same people who frown upon academics who happen to support President Duterte, even if in a qualified way, and who do not join in the blind demonization of the Marcoses. They diminish any attempt to appeal to a more objective and balanced view of Martial Law by labeling this as historical revisionism. Those who dare to disagree with the preferred narratives are labeled by these people as having betrayed the standards of academic integrity.

I know this for a fact because I am one of those people they have demeaned and diminished. I remember being asked by one respected academic in my discipline straight to my face, with the contempt one can’t effectively hide, whatever happened to me, as if I had done something wrong that could have violated the tenets of my discipline.

As academics, we dwell on the standards of our discipline. As people who claim to be social scientists, we are admonished to temper our opinion with facts. We are urged to subordinate our politics to our scholarship. While it is extremely difficult to decouple ourselves from the political considering that, unlike natural scientists who study organisms other than their own, social scientists are embedded in society as social beings. We are all citizens, and we often find ourselves implicated in the political issues which we are commenting on.

Thus, there is nothing out of the ordinary for social scientists to express their political opinions. But certainly, there is something hypocritical when some behave as if their biases are more privileged than others. And this ascends to the level of impunity when those who diminish others for allegedly subordinating their academic scholarship to their partisan politics, are as guilty of committing the same offense.

The televised debate between Ms. Marcos and Dean Chel Diokno on the issue of term limits has practically led to these kinds of academics to unravel. And it is certainly most ironic that it was the position of someone without a degree from Princeton that revealed the partisan hypocrisy.

Marcos expressed her opposition to term limits and supported her position by citing the results of a study conducted by Pablo Querubin titled “Political Reform and Elite Persistence: Term Limits and Political Dynasties in the Philippines.” Using empirical data, Querubin found no evidence of a statistically significant impact of imposing term limits on the prevalence of political dynasties. The study found that elites persist despite the imposition of term limits, and political dynasties are even deepened with term-limited incumbents simply being replaced by their own family members. The results of the study also revealed that term limits, which are in fact designed to widen the political playing field, tended to have failed in enticing high-quality candidates to challenge incumbents, and they would prefer to wait until the latter’s term expires and run for an open seat. This then leads to a high incidence of unchallenged incumbents running in safe seats. In sum, Querubin’s study indicated that term limits are ineffective in bringing about political reform. Only a more direct mechanism to undermine the base of dynastic power, which can only be achieved through an anti-dynasty law, will have the potential for widening access to elected political office.

Marcos was therefore simply echoing the result of an academic study on the issue which was being debated. When given the chance to express his opinion, instead of debunking the claims made by Marcos based on Querubin’s findings, Diokno opted to make a politically partisan hit. Instead of showing the weakness of Querubin’s premises, Diokno pointed out that term limits are necessary in the context of the country’s experience with Marcos’ father, Ferdinand Sr., who grabbed power to extend his term, declared martial law and became a dictator. While eliciting the wild applause from an obviously partisan section of the live audience which found it pleasurable to watch how Diokno was able to shame Marcos, more so that he also made reference to Marcos’ family benefiting from the power grab, his argument actually was a miserable failure in logic.

Diokno practically demolished the logic of his own argument, by showing that term limits are not in fact effective in containing the emergence of a dictatorship. By banking on martial law as the core of his counter-punch, Diokno practically knocked out his own logical premise — that we need term limits because of our experience with Marcos, even if we had him despite the fact that he was limited by a fixed term.

Diokno may be forgiven. The pressures of a time limit, and the need to squeeze in the usual anti-martial law mantra to please his base, may have been too constraining to fully express his views.

But what is unforgivable is when some people from academe, those who had the audacity to chastise people like me for allegedly betraying our academic integrity by subordinating our scholarship to our politics, cheered Diokno and jeered Marcos. There were those who ignored the scientific basis of Marcos’ opinion. And there were also those who argued that Marcos simply misinterpreted the research. Ronald Mendoza, dean of the Ateneo School of Government, even blamed Querubin for not being careful in his conclusions, which resulted in it now being misused.

All of these are simply because Marcos is not the politician these academics like, and her position is one that they do not agree with.

It is now my turn to ask. Whatever happened to them?

https://www.manilatimes.net/academic-hypocrisy/511361/