UP ALUMNI COUNCIL MEETING SERIES

Presentation to the 2010 UP Alumni Council Meeting, June 25, 2010, Ang Bahay Alumni, UP, Diliman, Quezon City

By Dr. Caesar A. Saloma, BS'81; MS'84; PhD'89

When it was first signed into law on April 29, 2008, its framers and sponsors
envisioned that Republic Act No. 9500 would strengthen the University of the Philippines as the National University. It was crystal clear to them that if UP is to fulfill its noble purpose as the national university then it must be the preeminent graduate and research university of the country as well as its leading public service university all at the same time.

At the onset, let me clarify that to become all things to all men (and women) is more often than not, an ethereal mission in life. If the task of providing higher education to Filipinos were likened to a basketball game with the universities as players and I am certain that the task is more than just a game, then UP is being asked to play the multiple roles of guard, forward, and center simultaneously. At the highest level that basketball is played today, no single player is capable of fulfilling even just a dual role.

I contend that for UP to truly accomplish its stated purpose as the national university, it must first become a great research university approximating other universities like Harvard, Stanford and Cambridge which have consistently emerged as the best in the world as determined by the ranking system developed and used by the Center for World Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tung University.

Kindly allow me to explain why. When we talk of ‘research’ we mean ‘scientific research’. Scientific research is aimed at extending human knowledge of the physical, biological, and social world beyond what is already known. The objective of a scientist or researcher is to attain a more accurate understanding of how Nature works.

Well meaning individuals of dissimilar worldviews including the great religions, will suggest different explanations of one and the same natural phenomenon. For example, there is the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection first proposed by Charles Darwin on the one hand and the Theory of Intelligent Design on the other, to explain the origin of (the human) species. Which one is correct?

The philosopher Karl Raimund Popper (1902 - 1994) was the first to point out that an
explanation or hypothesis is scientific if it is falsifiable and that a scientific explanation is proven correct if and only if it is validated experimentally. There is no science without measurement.

In the last fifteen years or so, UP has been able to put into place a system of incentives to recognize and reward outstanding research performance. It has also invested earnestly on research infrastructure and equipment to enhance its capability to generate new scientific knowledge and to train the next generations of scientists and researchers in the country. These precious investments have not been wasted and are now bearing fruit. Today, UP scientists and researchers at least in the College of Science, UP Diliman are performing at a level higher than had ever been reached before.

However, UP must continue improving its capability to measure accurately the research productivity of its personnel and institutes in order to keep academic excellence from being trivialized. What was considered difficult before is now pedestrian. When I was an instructor at the then Department of Physics about 25 years ago, a physics faculty who succeeded in publishing a paper in a peer-reviewed international journal was an overachiever. We the junior faculty in that bygone era, were more than glad to genuflect before the author in the Palma Pavilion corridor. Now a PhD faculty is a disappointment if he or she could not publish while at the National Institute of Physics.

UP has stopped appointing new university professors after 1995. The reason I think is not that recent generations of faculty members are not good enough. Rather it is because UP has been enfeebled by the failure to upgrade and recalibrate its system of measuring academic excellence and scientific productivity and slowly lost the administrative courage to delineate extraordinary accomplishment from required output. In a globally connected world where information about citation intensities and international recognition is easily available and verified, the continuing abeyance is quite perplexing to me.

UP could not function accordingly as a graduate university and produce the next generations of PhD and MS graduates of the country, if it is not successful at scientific research. After all, the PhD degree is a research degree. It is awarded to a graduate student who has contributed something new (i.e. original and novel) to the body of scientific knowledge.

UP could not also serve the public distinctly and uniquely as a university if its faculty, staff and students are underperforming scientists and researchers. UP is expected to propose effective solutions to various socio-economic and environmental challenges that continue to pressure this country of 92 million people. And past experience would reveal that the effective solutions are those that are derived scientifically. I call upon the UP community to continue improving the accuracy of its system for measuring scientific productivity and creativity so that excellence is properly and promptly recognized.

Thank you for your kind attention.