An Open Letter To The New UP President

Dear Mr President:

My best wishes to you now that you are sitting as the new head of UP. I hope you are a change for the better.

Change is coming? Change is becoming. Right off I say, the UP Oblation needs to be changed – it has been irrelevant for far too long! This is an alumnus speaking, UP '65. (Image of Oblation at UP Los Baños, taken by me 20 July 2016, painterized)

So, what public good has UP done lately? None that I know of. Not surprisingly. Academic freedom has nothing to offer, neither a shirt to cover somebody else's back nor shorts to cover somebody else's genitals.

This is all because the University of the Philippines System, or UP, lacks a Vision. And no, Sir, Mr UP President Danilo Concepcion, I did not find any declaration of Vision in your Vision Statement titled "The Search For The Next President Of The University Of The Philippines – Vision Statement" (which I downloaded in pdf from osu.up.edu.ph).

You're not alone. Vision is an elusive target. None of the candidates for Philippine President: not Rodrigo Duterte, not Mar Roxas, not Grace Poe, not Jejomar Binay; and none of you candidates for UP President; and none of the candidates for US President: not Hillary Clinton – only Donald Trump was intelligent enough to articulate a proper and brilliant vision in terms of target territory:

"Make America Great Again." 

That's a great Vision that is at the same time a great Slogan. I like Trump already.

Sorry to say but not one of you UP presidential candidates could have put up something similar: "Make UP Great Again" because, plainly, UP has never been great. Yes, I'm a proud alumnus despite that. I'm a writer; I've been blogging since 2005 and I always do research (search) before I write; I've also been in and around the University of the Philippines in the last 50 years, so I should know whereof I speak.

In the very first paragraph of your Vision Statement, you say, "The resurgence of the University of the Philippines (UP) among the world’s top 400 universities is a remarkable testament to the effective efforts of the past and present administrators of the University." Incorrect, Mr President. Or, correct but irrelevant – not one of the World University Rankings by the QS, Times Higher Education, and Center for World University Rankings consider "serving the needs of the country" as one of the criteria for excellence. That should be the #1 measure of educational brilliance. More so with the University of the Philippines because it is a public university and is very proud to say it is the National University. Pride before the Fail.

"Excellence is in the details," Perry Paxton says. With UP as an educational institution, those details would be knowledge, technology, innovation. To serve the public good.

"Tech innovators challenged to champion public good" says a story by Doris Dumlao-Abadilla at Inquirer.net (12 February 2017, business.inquirer.net). This one, says Ms Doris, is "a new challenge for technology innovators around the world to create cutting-edge solutions to serve the public good, particularly promote integrity, accountability and transparency in the public sector and beyond."

Those 3 should be low priority for UP; later, we can talk about integrity, accountability and transparency, even nudity for the sake of art – when our stomachs are full and there is promise of the next meal and the next. If you are hungry or poor, art is farthest from your mind.

What I am looking for right now from UP are innovations in science or technology for the public good. I challenge anyone to show me one. 

So, Mr President, I'm sorry to say that, based on your Vision Mission statement even as a candidate for UP President, I know UP will hardly be working for the common good, especially the poor farmers. 

Where are the technology innovators from UP when you need them most!? (Oblation)

Mr President, the closest you have come calling for technology innovation is this paragraph:

UP should create, conserve, and communicate knowledge with the needs of the country in mind. UP should strengthen its academic journals by ensuring their frequent and prompt publication. Faculty members should be given monetary and non-monetary incentives if they choose to publish in UP's journals, more so if they choose to conduct studies in areas that have significant impact on national, local and grassroots development. We are aware that knowledge is useless if it is not transmitted and applied.

The "knowledge" you mention in your Vision Statement can be either or both software and hardware, something to do or something to use efficiently and effectively. But the use of such sets of knowledge can only become true if they are first published in world-class technical journals and later transformed into articles that appear in popular publications as understandable news or views, readable by the people, the instructions doable by even the hardly literate.

In fact you mention "knowledge" 7 times in your Vision Statement of 1,951 words. Knowledge is a Very Important Promise, VIP. Thus you mention "academic endeavors as vital contributions in the production of knowledge." And yes Sir, as you say, knowledge must meet the needs of the country. And no Sir, UP has hardly contributed to the dissemination of knowledge because of the poverty and paucity of its publications – they come out too few times and contain too few papers that can be of public application later once translated into popular language. But that's exactly the problem: UP journals come out too few and far between! So, Sir what are you going to do about it?

It is not as you imply that faculty members are not given monetary incentives to publish – already, I know they receive US$1,000 each if they publish in a world-class journal. Even given that incentive, they do it infrequently because the journals come out infrequently too, and there is no system-wide campaign encouraging the publishing of research results.

No, your Vision Statement neither mentions that problem nor do you prescribe that UP publications come out more often than they have been doing over the years. You say, "We are aware that knowledge is useless if it is not transmitted and applied." Before that, Sir, knowledge is useless unless announced, which is the job of technical journals; unless available, which is the job of popular publications.

There is no excuse for any UP editorial staff, including the Editor, for not mastering desktop publishing so that an entire issue can come out within 3 months, reviews, revising, editing and layouting thrown in. I know that personally, because
I am the editor who single-handedly brought a Philippine journal, based at one of the campuses of UP, from antiquity to modern times. In 2003, the Philippine Journal of Crop Science, or PJCS, was a thousand days late with its issues when I took over as Editor in Chief, and within 3 years made PJCS world-class, that is, found in the international elite list called ISI (now ISI Web of Knowledge) – the rest of the story you can read in my earlier essay, "What UP Lacks In Knowledge It Doesn't Know!" (Common Cause, blogspot.com). Suffice it to say here that as a one-man band – editor, proofreader, layout artist – I finished working on an entire issue up to camera-ready pages within 3 months. Older now, today I can do it even faster, and I thank God.

That is to say, my expertise is a complete mastery of the publishing process, which I am sure none of the editorial staff of any journal within UP does possess – which explains the running of UP journals at turtle pace. I speak from decades of experience. I was already 63 when I worked that modern marvel at PJCS, so those younger journal people have no excuses for being laggards. I can demonstrate the unbelievable speed of editing, grammar checking, all of desktop publishing beginning with raw manuscripts in a free half-day demo, your place not mine; email me at frankahilario@gmail.com. It’s the least I can do for my alma mater, and for the Filipino people who are paying the taxes that go into paying all personnel of the University of the Philippines from Luzon to the Visayas to Mindanao.

You also say in your Vision Statement:

The essence of UP is not merely to transmit knowledge, but to serve the nation; and this sense of mission should pervade all fronts of the university's functions – from educating its students, to caring for its personnel, to defining its role in nation-building.

More than defining its role in nation-building, as I already intimated in my earlier essay (cited above), UP should be producing knowledge, transmitting such to the technical minded and translating such for the popular minded, as its contribution to nation-building.

This old man of 77 years would like to show what the young ones of 27, or 37, or 47 years of age should be able to do to publish technical journals at least 4 times a year and, equally important, to be able to translate the technical knowledge gained from research into popular language for the masses to chew, digest and absorb into their systems. Only then can you say that UP is carrying out its role as you prescribe it: "create, conserve, and communicate knowledge with the needs of the country in mind."

Very sincerely yours,

Frank A Hilario @

13 February 2017. Total word count, excluding this line. 1577