Teaching, the commoditization of research and ‘vocationalization’ of tertiary education

BY ANTONIO CONTRERAS       MARCH 26, 2019

THERE is a reinvigorated effort to entice Filipino scholars from abroad to come home and rejoin the ranks of Filipino scientists to help in nation-building. It is most likely that many of them will be offered posts in universities and other higher education institutions (HEIs), where they are also expected to teach. And it is there that they join those who remained or those like me who returned after our graduate studies abroad as we endure being turned into resources who will be weighed not according to our actual impacts on society, but on how many papers we present in high-impact conferences and publish in high-impact journals.

We now have an academic landscape where the noble vocation of teaching is no longer the core of the university, albeit it is reduced simply as a necessary condition, measured in teaching evaluations that are in fact easily gamed and are not authentic measures of long-term impact. And there is a new pedagogical ideology that is now celebrated in the form of outcomes-based education, which is simply a mechanism to ensure that the educational system produces a labor force that fits the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution. This is a world where engineering, the hard sciences, technology and applied mathematics, which include business and economics, find a natural home, and where the humanities and the interpretive social scientists are now measured for the value of their creative work not for their own sake, but as appended to some rationale of making the labor force human, happy and aesthetically well-nourished. There is too much focus on ethics and logic, simply because these are norms for behavior that can be used to exact compliance. Anything that goes against the dominant constructs is ruled as short of heresy in a world dominated by the logical reason of science and the ethical power of social institutions. There is a concerted effort to teach critical thinking, but as a technique to turn citizens into rational calculators of profit and performativity, but not as social critics, or as rebels with causes. Thus, tertiary education is somewhat “vocationalized,” where focus is shifted towards the learning of skills to optimize employability and ensure the usefulness of graduates.

It is here that the university is hit by twin attacks that diminish its potential to be truly the refuge for critical knowledge. On one hand, its pedagogy is expected to produce employable graduates with skills that are compatible with the needs of industry, even as its faculty are pressured to conduct research and publish not for their actual impacts on society, but to generate citations that are needed to feed academic rankings, which has become a global industry and has engendered the emergence of accreditation services that serve to enhance bragging rights. Thus, we see the irony of faculty members as teachers being deployed to focus on the generation of employable skills, even as they as researchers are being weighed and measured not on the actual production of usable knowledge, but simply as generators of publications in Scopus and ISI-listed, peer-reviewed journals.

And as if this were not enough, the professors cum researchers will now be facing the specter of an employment landscape that may not actually be kind to their future. This is nowhere more poignantly illustrated than by what the late Dr. Gelia T. Castillo had to endure, and her family continues to endure even after her death. Dr. Castillo was an academician, a well-known rural sociologist who devoted her entire career to the advancement of her discipline. When she died, the Republic buried her at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, as a tribute to her being a proclaimed national scientist. But this symbolic salutation was marred by the misfortune of her being impleaded as a defendant in a criminal case in her capacity as a member of the board of a research institution. Dr. Castillo, even in death, had to suffer the pain of her minted name being dragged into court proceedings, for simply being part of a body that approved a controversial car plan for employees for which she never benefited materially or financially. This is how the Republic repaid her for her impeccable service to the nation. It is not as if we want Dr. Castillo, or anyone like her, to receive special treatment, but certainly removing her name from the case since she is no longer alive to defend herself would not have been too much to ask.

Elsewhere, we see many professors not enjoying the benefit of the full implementation of the Anti-age Discrimination Law, which stipulates that the mandatory retirement age is 65. Many private HEIs insist on an earlier retirement of 60, taking advantage of the loophole in the law where such can be legal as long as there is consent from the faculty. But in reality, retiring faculty members have no choice but to accept such an option. Faced with recalcitrant university administrators, professors, many of whom are not fully unionized, do not have the wherewithal and the resources to pursue a legal battle. In some instances, retiring faculty members even had to settle with a downgraded status of not enjoying their pre-retirement benefits in exchange for nonregular appointments, if only to have at least their full salaries.

Thus, we now see the specter of faculty members in their senior years, nearing the end of their careers, after serving their vocation, now compromising their legal rights and their sense of self-esteem just to make sure they have the semblance of a full-time job. And worse, they can even be denied such non-regular status considering that it is not automatically given. There is a sense of cruelty when at the end of their careers, professors will be made to feel that they are not deserving after all these years.

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