Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
APART from the comparatively low pay and few benefits, why are professors leaving their universities? Why are those recently retired not being hired by the universities where they had worked for 40 years?
Our universities are riddled with some systemic defects, aside from the hugely irresponsible one of allowing a foreign psycho to run the training of a basketball team that led to the death of its two young and talented players. Now going the rounds of Facebook is a perceptive analysis on “the committee room.” Excerpts follow.
“The true work of the university is rarely performed at the podium. It takes place in the committee room — a sequestered space where a self-selecting cast tends to the machinery of tenure files, grant approvals and the ritualized scrutiny of the thesis defense.
There, the morning may be spent lecturing on the complexities of ethics. The afternoon, in the far more practical business of closing doors.
“In these chambers, a grant application does not simply lose. It vanishes. A mentor who once championed a project may, through a strategic silence, ensure its burial. Consider the candidate whose primary source analysis is unassailable, yet finds their file stalled for months under the guise of ‘clarification,’ only for the department chair to remark, over coffee, that the work simply ‘lacked a certain departmental harmony.’ A thesis chapter is dismissed for a ‘lack of rigor,’ only for that same work to be lauded, months later, by a national committee. No one is expected to acknowledge the discrepancy. The reviewer simply moves to the next file, the oversight smoothed over by the unblinking pace of administrative process.
“Social cohesion — often codified as ‘fit’ — governs the floor. In this climate, the outsider is not merely a colleague with a dissenting view. They are an intruder. Talent, if it arrives without the requisite cultural pedigree, becomes a liability. The mentor’s role is frequently subsumed by the gatekeeper’s, and departments drift toward recruiting in their own image. Under this pressure, the range of permissible inquiry narrows. Ideas that have not been vetted by the local culture are treated not as intellectual contributions, but as institutional hazards.
“When a decision is questioned, the defense is almost always ‘academic judgment’— a phrase that functions as a procedural deadbolt. Oversight committees rarely audit the record of the one who rejected the file. They audit the paperwork of the one who was rejected. To file a formal grievance is to engage in a war of professional attrition. The people who control the grants and the letters of recommendation are often the same people who sit on the investigative panels. The mechanism of enforcement is rarely overt: it is a misplaced file, a withheld nomination, or a casual word of doubt passed in a hallway.
“This is not a failure of the system. It is the system functioning as designed. If the academy were intended to facilitate the discovery of truth, it would be vulnerable to the volatility of genius. Instead, it exists to regulate the terms under which truth may be sought, prioritizing stability over insight. The rhetoric of integrity is merely the necessary noise that masks the consolidation of power. As the faces at the podium change, the liturgy continues, but the perimeter of the enclosure remains undisturbed. The work is never about discovery. It is about ensuring that whatever is discovered never poses a threat to the room.”
I once worked at a foreign university whose Department of English was in the red. I was a business management major at Ateneo de Manila University and had already worked as a dean of journalism and president at The Manila Times College. I immediately buckled down to work.
I led the student recruitment team that attended marketing fairs, fielded questions from parents and students, and monitored student retention. Every student paid a tuition fee equivalent to P350,000 per semester, so I ensured that all of them stayed in the program. Those with mental-health issues were given help by the Well-being Office, and I monitored every case with a hawk’s eye.
I also froze the hiring of full-time faculty, hired part-time faculty, and the money saved I funneled to faculty research. We won the award for best faculty research for three consecutive years, which is equivalent to my term. We also won the award for the faculty with the highest student satisfaction survey results for three years (92-percent average).
After one year, we began making money, thanks to a higher enrollment, and in the second year, we became a profit center. But what did the insecure dean do? He accused me of siphoning funds from one project to another, and I told him that if he can prove that I stole a single coin, I would resign the next day. But if he could not, then it would be his turn to resign. He did not respond to that.
He also accused a female Filipino professor of plagiarism, upon the mere say-so of an aggrieved graduate student. He did not form a committee nor asked human resources to intervene. The Filipino professor got sick and almost passed away. We were so furious; the dean backtracked. He was later asked to resign. So as in the fairy tales, it was a case of the bad one elbowing the good ones out, shielding his acts with what Winston Churchill called “a bodyguard of lies.”
Now the dean is ill and cannot work, cannot bully people anymore. That is why I always believe in karma; the universe has a way of balancing things out in the end.
Many professors have also left Ateneo de Manila University, especially its Department of English, in the last three years. Reasons vary, from the division of the department into two departments, turf issues and old wounds. I myself was not given a teaching load in this department where I taught for three decades — the best years of my life.
I was also not given a load to teach Creative Writing, even if the recently departed Rofel Brion and I founded the Creative Writing Program in the year 2000. In the US, creative writing teachers are at various stages of their careers — young, mid-career, retiring. This gives students a chance to learn from various viewpoints. But Ateneo hires on the basis of youth and friendship, a “barkadahan.” Many of their creative-writing teachers have not even written any books! It’s a case of the blind leading the blind.
Perhaps, they find my hourly rate as a professorial lecturer too high; but it was a rate that was given by the university itself. Fresh graduates could be hired for P300 per hour. Just do not ask what a newly minted graduate can do, except regurgitate lessons learned the past year.
So, don’t ask me why our universities are in the bottom rung of world rankings. But you don’t need the rankings to see how low we have sunk — there are now so few creative people in a sea of mediocrity. Even those who have stayed are unhappy. So sad, because we only have one life to live.