Wanted: A New Chancellor for a Cash Cow College

The image is apt: You see a modern-day building of the 100-year old University of the Philippines Los Baños, and beside it a gnarled at-least-50-year old acacia tree growing – the old alongside the new. I took that photograph on Valentine’s Day last year in a moment of admiration. The old sheltering the new. One typhoon and that tree toppled to the ground, roots up; it's gone now. For everything, there is a season, a time for the old and a time for the new. Tree today, gone tomorrow.

For the last 50 years, I’ve been in and out and around the University of the Philippines Los Baños; notwithstanding, for the last 36 years, since 1972, when this Cow College became a University, I’ve never had any avid interest in who becomes the UPLB Chancellor. I also have not been interested in answering the question, ‘Quo Vadis, UP Los Baños?’ Until now. Today, I think of them as one question and one question only: ‘Quo Vadis, under Who?’ When choosing a leader, the chooser is the master.

In her August 20 column, ‘Choosing the next UPLB Chancellor’ (At Large, inquirer.net), Rina Jimenez-David of the Philippine Daily Inquirer brings out the questions and answers in the current competition for the position of being the next Chancellor of UP Los Baños. She names two candidates (lady first):

Candida ‘Ayds’ B Adalla, Professor of Entomology, 2-time and 1st woman Dean of the College of Agriculture of this great University.

Luis Rey ‘Rey’ I Velasco, Professor of Entomology, ending his first term as Chancellor of UP Los Baños.

Actually, there is one other candidate (uplb.edu.ph):

Felino ‘Fel’ P Lansigan, Professor of Statistics, Research Fellow of the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA).

Discussing, Rina did not mention Fel and I won’t either. From where I sit, this is a classic battle of the sexes, the lady on one hand and the gentleman on the other, Ayds versus Rey. And I feel privileged that I have known them both personally. Both have strong personalities.

Rey was only that high when I was boarding at the Velasco’s Dorm in the middle 1960s, when P50 was good enough for a whole month of meals (except breakfast). His father, Jose Velasco, a good man, already a name in our Cow College at that time, didn’t mind me, a boarder, eating with the rest of the family, and I wasn’t a relative either. He had a scholarly mind, and I minded that. Many years later, I remember Rey favoring the Philippine Agricultural Scientist (Philippine Agriculturist) with much-needed funds for producing the journal, for the purchase of computers, if I remember right, in that office where at that time I was an associate editor helping out Editor in Chief Ofelia K Bautista work for the journal’s ISI-accreditation by producing, at my end, well-edited, (almost) letter-perfect camera-ready copy. ISI is the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for technical journals. We succeeded in getting the journal to be ISI within a year, I think, thanks also to Rey’s assistance – that journal is heavily reliant on computers for editing, reviewing and desktop publishing the manuscripts.

Ayds was one of my students in Horticulture at the Cow College in the late 1960s when she was First Year. I gave her a grade of 1, as I did Vic Ladlad. Many years later, I was pleasantly surprised as well as intrigued no end to learn that Ayds had become Dean of the College of Agriculture and Vic had become an NPA commander. One chose academic freedom, the other political freedom.

Did I as instructor do something right – and something wrong? My wife says each one of us chooses his/her own path of life. Did not Ayds Adalla and Vic Ladlad choose theirs and differently? I remember only that I was teaching the class of Ayds and Vic how to think for themselves even as I showed and told the young minds via the lab exercises in the field about methods sexual and non-sexual – yes, I am referring to the multiplication of the species.

So, what else is new? In case you don’t know, I must explain that in the propagation of plants, sexual refers to the use of seeds for planting and non-sexual (technically, asexual) refers to the use of grafts, buds, marcots, stems or leaves to multiply the tree, vegetable, or ornamental. Sex of those species is not that interesting, no.

Now then I can say that this time the battle for the next UP Los Baños Chancellor is also sexual – The Battle of the Sexes. This is exciting!

In her Inquirer column, Rina chooses to pit the male against the female on two different aspects (my reading of Rina): leadership potential and a record of (alleged) wrongs and rights, and Ayds wins hands down – I will let it be. Rina is entitled to her views, and I am entitled to mine. While no longer a young man, I would rather dream dreams and see visions.

Now then, I will judge the two better candidates on the basis of a vision: UP Los Baños as The Great Asian University of the rich, for the rich and by the rich – rich in ideas, rich in innovation, rich in opportunities for the poor (and inarticulate) to transform science not only into a piece of paper to get an employment but more so into an entrepreneurial system for the small man with a family, that which is not necessarily a small family. As a Roman Catholic, this is the only family planning I believe in – a father, mother, children all together planning for a family-size enterprise. (I’m much interested, because I’m not very good at this.)

The way I see it, UP Los Baños should be the Asian leader for education not simply for employment but more so for entrepreneurship and not simply in agriculture but also in food. I’m dreaming of the Asian Center of Knowledge in Food and Agriculture – for employment and entrepreneurship: I can dream, can’t I? In fact, what is wrong with UP education is what is wrong with the whole Philippine educational system: as a horse on a saddle, it is blindly led towards employment and almost totally ignores entrepreneurship.

I have learned by email from my good friend Jerry Quibilan that Senate President Manuel Villar once had a dream for one million entrepreneurs – what happened to that dream, Mr Senator? Did you suddenly wake up and realize that it is an impossible dream? Precisely! That’s why we must dream – what is the value and excitement of dreaming if we dream only the possible? UP Los Baños used to be called, in derision, a Cow College. I say, let us make UP Los Baños a Cash Cow College – where everyone learns to be an entrepreneur and not simply a job-seeker, a higher-class seller of wares or, worse, a be-degreed intellectual mendicant. Why do 3,000 Filipinos leave for abroad everyday? It is a measure of our success as educators! Our universities have successfully trained them to look for jobs, and when they can’t find them here, they look elsewhere. So, if we consider OFWs modern-day heroes, then heroism begins in the classrooms of our universities. Me, I’ll look for my heroes elsewhere.

Rina Jimenez-David writes that under Chancellor Velasco, the UPLB Chancellor has frozen the delights of students to hold their own student body elections, that is, ‘students rights have been curtailed.’ Actually, rights can be curtailed only if they are not exercised, if nobody dares to exercise them. Who was it who said? ‘There are no tyrants where there are no slaves.’ Jose Rizal, the national hero of the Philippines. The exercise of a right comes not from the law but from the one who exercises such a right. As far as the executive is concerned, a human must be respected – but, when it comes to human rights, first of all, as far as the human is concerned, a right must be exercised.

Have there been ‘demoralizing events’ in UP Los Baños under Velasco as Rina reports? Of course there are. The whole country has been suffering from one demoralizing event after another – so, what else is new? We Filipinos are the ones who demoralize ourselves. If there is a ‘continuing suppression of labor rights,’ that only means there is a continuing non-exercise of labor rights by labor. A right is not a gift; rather, it is an exercise.

If there is at UP Los Baños ‘a prevalent atmosphere of cynicism and frustration,’ that is because we cultivate it. In any University, it is not the Chancellor who cultivates cynicism, not to mention elitism – it is the constituents who do. If the leader is bad, why should the followers follow?

Will the selection of Ayds Adalla as the new Chancellor signal ‘a new direction for the University’ – a new beginning? Only if the UP Los Baños staff and students see the wisdom of a new beginning. Also, that depends on what kind of new beginning. I have yet to see a Chancellor of this University come up with new ideas on how to make UP Los Baños relevant to the needs of the times – as dictated by the needs of the people, and not as dictated by the needs of the professors in their chosen, respected, tightly guarded disciplines. As in the whole of UP and indeed of all the kingdom of science, the approach to science for development has always been top-down – I am the top, I tell those of you at the bottom what to do because I know better. I know my discipline right side up; I am up-to-date in my knowledge bank; I am the one with the postgraduate study from a prestigious university abroad, not you, got it?

And the ladies and gentlemen of Congress who don’t have a PhD either? On the subject of which way out of poverty, they also have the belief that they know better. The Battle of the Sexes goes on. Their proposed law on reproductive health in fact looks at marriage as a battle of the sexes, the wife having as much right to her body as the husband. Family is family; if you equate poverty with the number of children in the family, you have reduced matrimony to a matter of money, downgraded an institution much valued by our society if not by your belief.

Is man-made family planning your best law? That’s the problem with man-made laws.

I know Ayds Adalla is a Roman Catholic, Couples for Christ; she and her husband were pioneers in Laguna in propagating Gawad Kalinga (‘Give Kingly’ is my translation) - in those good old days, they had to bake cakes and biscuits to sell in order to raise funds. GK is telling us: Pay good attention, people. Build up communities, not build down families. Even as I am a Roman Catholic with 12 children and only 1 wife and no extra-marital affairs of any kind, and I own neither a house nor a car nor a motorcycle, I have no quarrel with science – but I do have a quarrel with scientists who think they know better. In a public forum this year organized by UP Los Baños (with Rey Velasco as Chancellor) at the height of the rice crisis (with Ayds Adalla attending), one of the scientists’ main proposed solutions to poverty is to control population, aka reproductive health, and that’s when I publicly asked a rhetorical question, which was also a challenge to all scientists and scholars who thought mostly in terms of economics:

Is man-made family planning your best science?