blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

John Henry Cardinal Newman The Catholic Church is probably the only religion which raises reason together with faith as a standard for thinking and with it, life. And just for that as a way to praising the Divine, she invented the university, made sure this flourished to the present day, nurtured the arts and gave birth to science, the social sciences and modern mathematics. The Church has always had a space for thinkers and that space sometimes was the Papal throne or at least the seat of the local diocese. Two of the recent popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI are major contributors to philosophy and theology and in J ohn Paul II, even environmental ethics . Benedict is known to follow developments in science. Traditionally, the Catholic universities are the spaces for thinking with or even against the Church. Ah yes! The University, the alma mater studiorum as the University in Bologna, the world's oldest in existence has for its motto. The University is semper liberi...

I have been following the debate on the Catholic identity of the Ateneo de Manila University and I immediately recalled my English lit class in "Godless" University of the Philippines where we had to read selections from John Henry Newman's "The Idea of a University". Our devout Methodist professor required us to really understand it. Newman is considered as one of the sylists of apologetic literature and the Essay in English. All the quotes in this post were cut and pasted from Newman's essay. Now that I have made the attribution, I wish to be absolved of the sin of plagiarism! The Oxford don and Anglican priest, John Henry Newman  is the most famous of Anglican "returnees" to the Roman Church. He is also one of the greatest theologians in 19th Century England.  As a consequence of becoming a Roman Catholic he had to leave Oxford. For those of my friends who are associated with the University of the Philippines, this is like being banished fro...

My lectures to undergraduates on academic freedom is within the subject of the history of science in relation to the history of the Roman Church.  The thesis is that the this freedom is at the root for the esse or being of the university. The concept of academic freedom was first formalized in German medieval universities but essentially was practiced in all of Europe's ancient universities, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Palencia, Heidelberg etc The Roman Catholic Church in fact founded all of these universities and the liberties granted by the secular powers and the Church were respected. Some of the universities like Oxford and Cambridge passed into Protestant hands in the Reformation but still they held on to these liberties. Thus with academic freedom which extends to professors and their students (with their inherent rights), science and the arts flourished. Without these freedoms, the freedom of research would have been curtailed. As paradoxically it sounds to 21st s...

The allegation that a justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines plagiarized articles published in legal journals is very serious matter not just for the court but for Filipino society as well. Plagiarism is simply closely imitating (copying) ideas of others and passing them as your own without due reference to the author. In academe, this is considered as The Sin as it represents dishonesty of the highest degree. Students, professors and researchers caught doing so face expulsion or termination of employment. In journalism, it is considered as a breach of journalist's ethics and may warrant a suspension and dismissal from the media outfit. The University of the Philippines in Diliman (UP) proposes in its code of student conduct penalties for plagiarism. For the first offense, suspension for a semester and for the second expulsion. These penalties are stiffer than previous ones when the length of the penalty of suspension was determined by the student disciplinary tribunal....

The University of Illinois reinstated Dr Kenneth Howell who was fired by the university for teaching the Roman Catholic Church's doctrinal position on homosexuality. Dr Howell taught a course on Catholicism. EWTN news has this to say ' In a class on Catholicism last spring, he followed up a classroom discussion with an e-mail contrasting the ways in which utilitarianism and natural law theory would each determine the morality of homosexual conduct. A student complained that Howell's words were “hate speech” in an e-mail to the head of the department, Dr. Robert McKim. Howell was called into McKim's office at the end of the semester and told that he would no longer be allowed to teach for the university because his e-mail had “violate[d] university standards of inclusivity.” In Howell's defense, the ADF declared that the First Amendment exists to keep controversial ideas from being suppressed. “A university cannot censor professors’ speech--including clas...

I was digging through my lolo's Rizaliana, Quezoniana and UPiana when I came across a copy of a convocation lecture given by Professor Harley Harris Bartlett of the University of Michigan. Bartlett was a noted botanist and scholar of Southeast Asia. He was invited by the University of the Philippines to reasssess the status of the UP and Philippine higher education. The lecture entitled "The Status of the University of the Philioppines and of Higher Education in the Philippines" was given on the occassion of the first year anniversary of the Republic of the Philippines. The context of the speech was in the post war devastation faced by the UP and higher education. Bartlett asks the questions: Has the UP gained? or lost ground? Bartlett's important points include: The UP is essential to the Republic. If the university fails, then the Republic fails in part. The University exists to provide leaders for the nation. The future of a democracy rests on a large part on an eq...

The word coño is Pinoy slang for an Anglophone, sometimes Hispanophone person who studies in an "exclusive school", chauffered, and lives in a gated community. Among residents and businesses on Katipunan Road, Quezon City, they cause a periodic,thrice a day horrendous traffic snarl! Coño is not the word that best describes the traffic snarl of kilometres long magnitude. In Spain people use "coñazo" which translates to "extreme annoyance". The literal meaning is "what a giant cunt!" Anyway the reason for the snarl is due to the inordinate number of cars (many of them ferrying one student each) that try to enter the few gates of Ateneo and Miriam universities. This has irked MMDA 's chairman Bayani Fernando for years. He has tried his signature U turns, but that failed. He tried to uproot the trees on traffic islands on the road (so that more road space is available to motorists). He was blocked by "coño" environmentalists. Bayani th...

The University of the Philippines was ranked 398 in the latest 2007 Times Higher Education survey (THES) of top 500 universities worldwide. Across Katipunan Road, the Ateneo de Manila came at 451. De La Salle and University of Santo Tomas once part of the 500 have dropped out of the list. The UP website has this article about taking the survey results seriously. Ateneo's administrators have this to say and explain in detail how the rankings are made. The UP and De La Salle have opted out of the surveys. The THES apparently used the 2006 data. Both Ateneo and UP have said that the surveys do not really reflect the contribution of the university to Philippine society. Unfortunately, the surveys cannot be ignored. In the globalized world economy, higher education is more of a commodity than ever. The THES could change market preference for universities. That's why overseas universities take these surveys quite seriously. One Aussie university even had a press release on its ranki...

Fort Lauderdale, FL USA -Manolo Quezon writes something interesting about Pinoy global competitiveness in his " Bringing the world to our shores " What Manolo writes is very true. As an academic, I have seen that in this academic year; our department has seen an unprecedented number of graduate school applications to our programs. The only reason is that many of these applicants have been made redundant by company downsizing. In this situation the best option to maintain one's competitiveness is for one to go back to school. While Manolo writes about doing an MBA, I believe that this really won't give you that competitive edge. Manolo doesn't write that the problems of the world have been brought to our shores. One has to take academic programs that will allow you to fully exploit the opportunities provided by this new regime. It seems that the academic programs offered at our universities cannot cater for this. Even with CHED autonomy, universities are still trap...

This post should inspire ABD's (all but dissertation) and other PhD candidates losing steam! Queen's lead guitarist Brian May was very recently installed Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University . The largely honorary university post is usually given as a recognition of great achievement. What then is Brian May's great achievement aside from Queen rock gigastardom? May was once enrolled as a PhD student in astrophysics in the 1970's having earlier graduated with an honours degree in physics. But when Queen became a global hit, he abandoned his PhD studies. Thirty years later,in October 2007 he completed his PhD thesis on "A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud" passed his viva voce, made revisions and was granted the degree. (Brian May didn't get any special treatment in the PhD exam. Almost all candidates revise their thesis.) I agree with the university. Finishing a PhD is an achievement in itself. Finishing a PhD after 30 years d...

As the secular University of the Philippines celebrates its 100th year in 2008, Pope Benedict XVI's speech that he was supposed to deliver at Rome's La Sapienza Universitylast January 17 gives us some food for thought. EWTN has the full English text of the speech originally in Italian. I have always admired and have been amazed at Benedict's way of discourse. The former Don of Regensburg does not fall into stereotyping and logical twists unlike the Don of Oxford Richard Dawkins! That's why I await the day when the Oxford Don meets with the Infallible Regensburg Don! Bui I digress here are some highlights of the speech. " Well, so far I have only talked about the university in the Middle Ages, trying however to show to what extent its nature and purpose have remained the same all along. In modern times knowledge has become more multi-faceted, especially in the two broad fields that now prevail in universities. First of all, there are the natural sciences which have ...

Now that we are celebrating the University of the Philippines centennial, did you know that Graduate degrees UP awarded its first MA degree to a woman? Her name is Josefa Desiderio who got her MA in 1917, the year UP's grad school first produced its graduates. The next year saw UP award its first MSc degrees to two men, Amando Clemente and Jose Mirasol. The university also awarded its first research doctorates in 1918 in tropical medicine and public health. Before that time the university awarded professional doctorates in medicine and dentistry and of course honorary doctorates. Salaries As early as 1922 the UP had a problem with professors salaries. Professors' salaries were way below that of other professions. (What else is new?) Profs left to teach at private universities or go overseas. (What else has changed?!) Budget Even as early as 1919, UP wanted (and sorely needed) bigger state subsidies. UP got 1.12 million dollars from the Philippine Insular government. Compare t...

Today the University of the Philippines starts its year long celebrations of its centennial. The university was founded by the Philippine Legislature when it passed a bill granting the university its charter on 26 May 1908. On June 18 of that year the Governor General signed the bill into law. The university traces its foundation really from the First Philippine Republic which created the Universidad Literaria de Filipinas . When the republic fell to the American invaders, military government was first established and when limited representative government was established with civil rule, the Philippine assembly made it a priority to establish a state university. The father of the university is no less than Leon Ma. Guerrero , the chair of the education commitee of the assembly who sponsored the bill. Guerrero was professor of pharmacy in the Universidad Literaria, a cabinet minister of the republic and a leading scientist. The first colleges of the university are 1) Agriculture, 2)Vet...

I have a niece who passed the UP College Entrance Exam and now is a freshie at the College of Business Administration. She dropped by my faculty office to say hello on the first day of school, June 12. I was curious to find out how much her parents paid for fees and I was shocked. They paid about 20K pesos for this semester. I have attended the sometimes cum gravitas , ironic, flippant and comedic sessions of the University Council. In council the breakdown and schedule of the increased fees were shown as a Powerpoint presentation. The Chancellor (who chairs the sessions) explained how this increase is much needed given the parlous state of the university. True, the university's share of state subsidy has not increased and costs have increased. The results of this lack of funds is evident everywhere. The classrooms are overcrowded and there is a serious safety and security on campus. The university can't even pay for an effective security force to ensure students' safety. ...