What UP Lacks In Knowledge It Doesn't Know!

MANILA: up.edu.ph: The "University of the Philippines is among the world's Top 400" universities, the UP website is proud to say. I say, UP is proud, period. It has reasons to be. But when it comes to knowledge, UP should be ashamed of itself! That's my alma mater, and I'm ashamed of it.

Look at the image above; that's my screen capture today, 10 February 2017 at 0407 hours, with up.edu.ph still reporting that Alfredo E Pascual is UP President. As I revised this, I checked at 1217 hours, and Pascual is still UP President. With the information superhighway allowing the speed of light, UP is super late by 19 hours? Unforgivable! UP officials don't care about the news, even those that concern them.

It must be that UP does not care about updating public knowledge. The latest news about the latest UP President is really the latest, more than 2 months old. On 15 November 2016, Rappler, Inquirer.net. PhilStar.com, ABS-CBN.com, and InterAksyon reported that Danilo L Concepcion was elected as the new (21st) UP President. There was no news yesterday, which was supposed to be Pascual's last day in office.

Since there was no news about the turnover ceremony, I have to rely on Wikipedia: UP President Alfredo E Pascual's term ended yesterday, 09 February 2017 and that of new UP President Danilo L Concepcion begins today, 10 February 2017.

Concepcion says on that UP website:

The task of the next President is to ensure that UP remains true to its ideals. 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.

Even the new UP President does not see the whole picture of what UP is supposed to be doing, limiting it education, staff welfare, and "defining its role in nation-building." After defining that role, what? Are you telling me, Sir, that UP has not defined that role given that the institution is more than 100 years old today? In that case, age doesn't matter! Not defining but refining is correct.

I'm no longer surprised that UP is a laggard when it comes to knowledge even at this digital age. Almost 1 year ago, gmanetwork.com came up with the news, "Knowledge capital is the key to inclusive growth – UP study" and my response to that was this (see my essay, "Knowledge In UP Is Upside Down," Frank A Hilario, blogspot.com):

And UP keeps the knowledge to itself by not publishing technical papers, or taking 1-2 years to publish a paper. What about popularizing the technical for the consumption of the public? UP is a laggard in this regard. This is an editor speaking, a UP alumnus.

So, UP is true to itself not proclaiming knowledge as it comes, to the Filipino people, as it should. I must emphasize that UP owes them, being the "National University" of the Philippines.

In Republic Act 9500 signed by Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on 29 April 2008 (up.edu.ph), under "Section 3, Purpose of the University," UP is commanded to:

Serve as a research university in various fields of expertise and specialization by conducting basic and applied research and development, and promoting research in various colleges and universities, and contributing to the dissemination and application of knowledge.

If you ask me, those 37 words I have quoted above in fact constitute an overall statement of the failure of UP as a whole System. I say that because, somewhere in history, now forgotten, there are 3 stated functions of UP:

Instruction
Research
Extension.

UP is proud of the excellence of its Instruction, and it should be. UP has very high standards. I know that personally because I myself was kicked out of UP, although I hasten to add I redeemed myself, so I became UP '65 instead of UP '63.

What about Research? I alumnus don't know because UP is dragging its maroon & green feet in publishing research results! (More on this below.)

What about Extension? There's very little that I know of, and I should know more because I have always needed more data and information because I have been writing more than 101 UP professors combined when it comes to popularizing science. I have a 5-year old unchallenged claim as the "World's Most Creative Writer Alive On Paper & Online In Nonfiction" – if you want to know the details of this claim as to quantity, quality, style, craftsmanship and creativity, click on this link, blogspot.com, the quantity of which I have just updated in thousands and hundreds that I have published in my many blogs since I began blogging. That is in Blogger.com. This is a dramatization of what I called in 2005 yet, "The revenge of the unpublished writer" (I mentioned this in my essay, "Bloghard, Blogeasy," 28 December 2006, The World According To Worp, wordpress.com. That is in WordPress.com.)

Research and Extension must go together. This is how it goes:

Researchers, UP scientists included, must publish their research results as soon as possible. But what has been happening ever since I can remember, from 1975 when I started to become the Chief Information Officer, or CIO, or the Forest Research Institute, or FORI, based at UP Los Baños but under the Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, is that researchers are not properly encouraged by their offices to write their papers as well as are improperly discouraged by technical journals to write those manuscripts! I should know, because ever since I became the founding editor of the FORI quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop in the late 1970s, I have been minding the journal outputs of my alma mater UP. (FORI has since become the Ecosystems Research & Development Bureau.)

Extensionists are the ones supposed to popularize the knowledge that scientists discover. I should know, because ever since I became the founding editor of the FORI monthly popular newsletter Canopy, I have been looking at the popular-language outputs of this University. Because popularizing science is Extension, and that is one of the heavy duties of UP! And the UP people have no excuses because we are in the digital age where all you have to do is open your PC, type and click your mouse.

I know of course that UP professors are not PC savvy, and I ask, "Why not?" I taught myself, and now I'm a computer guru. If UP is among the top universities of the world, why can it not publish its technical journals bimonthly and publish its popular magazines and newsletters biweekly? Late news is bad news.

I know the technical reason: Despite the presence of UP Press, UP has not mastered the art of desktop publishing so that an issue can come off the press within 3 months after the beginning of the editing of the first technical paper. I should know, because no one has ever come close to my own Guinness Book of World Records:

I was the Editor in Chief who made the Philippine Journal of Crop Science a record-breaker. One, I made it up-to-date from being late 3 years within 3 years, in 2007, starting with the 2001 issues, which means that unlike what the Red Queen prescribed in Alice in Wonderland, I had to run twice faster just to stay in place. Two, I made that same journal ISI or world-class the very next year, after that journal had been trying to achieve that status since its maiden issue in 1976.

My secret? Aside from possessing unbelievable editing expertise earned through experience, I have unbelievable desktop publishing prowess earned through self-education – to see those issues physically is to believe.

And UP? It has the publications but not the power of the publisher. Right now, among other publications, UP has 6 journals with a "Category A" rating from the Commission on Higher Education, or CHEd (upd.edu.ph):

Humanities Diliman: A journal on Philippine Humanities
Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies
Philippine Humanities Review
Plaridel: A Journal of communication, Media and Society
Science Diliman: A Journal of Pure and Applied Science
Social Science Diliman

A CHEd Category A journal is "credited as an international level publication" and receives from CHEd P200,000 a year. Now then, money is no object, so why can't anyone of them come out at least 4 times a year!? I must credit it to the indolence of the Filipinos, of which our national hero Jose Rizal wrote and warned centuries ago. At this digital age, there is no excuse for intellectual indolence.

The "UP Diliman Journals Online" website says (journals.upd.edu.ph):

The University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman Journals Online is a free online service exclusively offered to UP Diliman journals. It aims to gather all the UP Diliman journals in a single repository; widen their dissemination and visibility online; and provide journal editors with a convenient means of implementing the editorial process.

No Sir. A website providing journal editors with a convenient means of implementing the editorial process is not enough; as I see it, the problem is the whole Technical Publication Process, or TechPub, which I see comprises the following 7 stages:

(1)     Editorial scrutiny of manuscript

(2)     Peer review

(3)     Revision

(4)     Editing

(5)     Desktop publishing

(6)     Copyreading / proofreading

(7)     Printing

The name of the process is my invention, but not the process itself, and that is the whole predicament:

Editorial scrutiny: If you are not friendly with the editor, your manuscript is at risk of being rejected outright, even if you learn that sad news only after several months. As Editor in Chief of the PJCS, it took me only an hour or so to investigate the paper and see what it lacks in terms of content, or what makes it good for publishing. The Editor owes it to the Author to tell which is which in no time at all.

Peer review: The journal has a list of reviewers. The review process usually takes not days, not weeks, but months. That is because the reviewers don't see it as their duty to do the review in 2-3 days. This is not to mention that if the reviewer of your paper has a similar paper in mind or in fact by himself, he will find excuses to reject your paper, or delay its publication. At the PJCS, with Professor Ted Mendoza as Chair of the Board of Editors, we saw to it that paper reviews were well within a day or two. One of our secrets is that we asked the reviewers not to edit the grammar, but to limit themselves to the technical aspects of the paper.

Revision. Revision resulting from a reviewer's recommendation should not take more than 2 days. At the PJCS, we actively helped the author revise the manuscript himself, cutting days of waiting.

Editing. Poor language editing is the most visible aspect of TechPub. It should not take more than a day even if the manuscript is 20 pages. At PJCS, what I did was finish a paper a day, turn to the next paper, and the next – and then repeat the process up to 5 times in the next 2 weeks just to make sure there are no technical errors or obvious poverty in the English language.

Desktop publishing. The modern application program, or app, must be used to format manuscripts into journal pages and sections. There is no substitute for mastery of the desktop publishing app. At PJCS, I was Editor in Chief and simultaneously the desktop publisher myself – I had complete control of TechPub for the journal. I could do a page layout of a raw manuscript of 20 pages in 5 minutes, given single and double columns, given graphs and tables. You have to master your app, or it will master you.

Copyreading & proofreading. Copyreading is comparing the desktopped version with the edited manuscript, comparing differences if at all. Proofreading is looking for any errors, despite the copyreading that may have been done. At the PJCS, I was the copyreader and proofreader at the same time; I made sure that with each and every paper, I read everything, word for word, at least 5 times all the time. I had the advantage of being a digital nerd: I was doing everything onscreen, using Outline Organize of Word XP (Word 2002, the latest at that time), not needing to print anything until it was time to go to press.

Printing. This should be the least of the worries in TechPub. At UP, with UP Press, printing for distribution copies should not be a bother at all. But it is if the journal's layout artist does not submit camera-ready pages, which you can have only if you know desktop publishing. At the PJCS, I was my own man from manuscript to camera-ready pages. Nothing beats a digital one-man band, and at that time I was already 63 years old. (You doubt that? For a free demonstration anywhere in Metro Manila, email me, frankahilario@gmail.com.)

There is no excuse for UP not coming out with any popular-language publication. UP cannot shirk its institutional Extension duty, no matter how it tries to bury it in technobabble.

To help popularize knowledge, right from the beginning UP should teach every science topic in college in non-technical terms, from A to Z, such as from:

Abstract to

Biology to

Chemistry to

Deviation to

Entropy to

Fabrication to

Geological Fault to

Human Ecology to

Information Technology to

Job Creation to

Knowledge Banking to

Laptop Computers to

Maximization to

Niche Marketing to

Omega 3 to

Programming to

Quadrants to

Robotics to

Systems to

Technology Dissemination to

Ultraism to

Vitamins to
Watersheds to
Xanthophyll to

Yoghurt to

Zygote.

Then, when UP graduates venture into the wild, blue yonder, or devastated countryside, they can talk to the locals with sense between their ears. Then we will know that in Knowledge, UP is indeed the #1 University in the World! @

10 February 2017. Essay word count, excluding this line. 2345