Reaction to "Changing Vison and Mission of Higher Education Research Amidst Globalization."

A Reaction to former Education Undesecretary Victor Ordoñez’s Opening Remarks entitled “The Changing Vision and Mission of Higher Education Research Amidst Globalization” during the Asia Pacific Conference on Higher Education Research held in Manila Hotel in August 2004

Prepared by: Mr. Gerry A. Marcelo
It is true that the last five years have brought tremendous eco-socio-political changes in the world compared to the last fifty years. I remember during my college days the concepts of globalization was used but not given so much attention and did not bother universities and governments alike. Acronyms like CPU, LCD, DLP, MP3, MP4, Ipod, Podcasting were never in our set of college vocabulary. And that was only less than 20 years ago. Now, the phenomena of globalization, interconnectedness and interdependence are the bywords in many educational, corporate, and international conferences. Never did these phenomena rocked our peaceful (that’s relative) existence, until now.

On the other hand, reflectively, globalization and the introduction of internet made our world smaller to our advantage. Having spent some months abroad myself, this globalization and all its corollary developments have served me much. A click and I was connected to my wife here in the Philippines and was updated about the changes that happened to my newly born son then. No need to send letters through the snail mail, no need to wait for the mailman along the street to find out if there is a letter for you or whether the “money order” coming from Mindanao has arrived. A browse in the net will give one, more information in 30 minutes than a whole day in the library. Corporately, top managers do not need to dictate to their respective secretaries who were slaves of their Olympia or worse Underwood typewriters, the content of the memorandum to be sent down the corporate line. Today’s managers are equipped with internet and Intranet browsers and e-mail capabilities helping them to disseminate information or send memoranda down the bottom of the corporate pyramid in a flash.

Expectedly, we thought that globalization with the help of internet capabilities will allow us to improve our collaboration, the quality of life in general and the level of understanding, and equity between the marginalized sector and the affluent sector of the society, the developed and developing countries (I don’t want to use first world and third world or underdeveloped – they sound depressing and discriminative to me!). That domination (so political) by the west of the east will be significantly reduced and that the flow of benefits will be more or less mutual between these spheres. But to our demise, they have not. It is fitting that Dr. Ordoñez dubbed the globalization phenomenon as the phenomenon of increasing multidimensional interdependence transcending not only local but international scale and permeating all spheres of the interdependence. Education, especially higher education is not immune to the encompassing repercussions of this dominant phenomenon. Being at the helm of knowledge and value dissemination, it is challenged to evaluate its framework and come-up with a paradigm shift to respond effectively to emerging needs of the global community. Unfortunately, according to Dr. Ordoñez, it failed. Education is tasked implicitly by the society to provide solutions to the rising concerns of the entire society – especially business.

I am tasked to react to the speech (or to the ideas) delivered by Dr. Ordoñez – a difficult task. Can I, with my shortsightedness against the impeccability of Dr. Ordoñez’s assessment of the reality? Try, I will! To my own demise!

Just recently, the Commission on Higher Education changed the curriculum for the Nursing Course. I am not so sure about their reasons, but it’s probably related to the inability of higher education to provide the necessary skills (this is just one of the many) nursing graduates are expected to learn and master. The originally four year nursing course is now a five year course. This change, I assume, is a response to the skills needs, which nursing schools failed to provide and develop among graduates that the market is looking for. I will not react to Dr. Ordoñez’s claim that higher education has failed to effect paradigm shift in the advent of globalization, rather I will use the example above (Nursing course curricular change) as a springboard to relate the idea to policy analysis. But before doing that – an apology – “I do not really know if my analysis will even pass for a policy analysis because I believe mine will be very shortsighted!” I will not look into the issue and analyze it in broad scale encompassing all aspects that needs scrutiny but concentrate on the sudden change effects within the institutions, specifically FEU.

Let me begin with the institutional repercussions of the CHED memo on Nursing curricular change. CHED failed to consider the systemic nature of the structures within educational institutions offering nursing course. Like other courses, Nursing graduates are required to take service subjects (don’t want to call them – minor subjects) which are offered by the Institute of Arts and Sciences or in other universities College of Arts and Letters. Most of these subjects are liberal subjects which I consider as crucial in enhancing and strengthening the humanitarian side of the students, making them more “humane” in the process. Quoting Svi Shapiro, David Gabbard in A Nation at Risk – Reloaded Part I, reacting to Goals 2000 of the Clinton Administration said that “ this is an approach to education “without heart or soul, a discourse about education that accepts reduces the education of the young to skills, knowledge, and competencies, one that liberalism’s excision from it of moral and spiritual concerns. It is a language that accepts a disastrously limited view of what it means to nurture a new generation for a world in crisis and pain.” The systemic nature of structures among educational institutions requires that other structures other than nursing be considered before implementation was effected. The sudden change created major disruptions in the subject offerings in the Arts and Sciences aside from the long range effect on the morals and values of the recipient students. Changes like merging of Philippine History with Political Science, Taxation and Agrarian Reform and Philippine Constitution, World History with Philippine Literature and restructuring the timing of subject offering in the nursing course affecting liberal arts subjects resulted into disruptions in the loading schemes among the departments in the Arts and Sciences. Dr. Ordoñez said that “there was …….inequality ratio...” (page 2) due to globalization. My application of this statement by Dr. Ordoñez will be on narrower context – specifically in the examples cited above. The merging of five areas in one subject (course) created a great shortage of subject offerings in the Department of Social Sciences and thus creating major worries for many faculty members who rely on the number of units for income ( I don’t want to discuss the long range economic effect of this to the faculty and their families). They will compete for lesser subject loads in the future (presently, they are experiencing a sudden pouring of subjects but come next semester, it will be a great drought!) The restructuring of the timing of subject offering will result in the same problem but longer lasting.

This is probably an example of what Dr. Ordoñez called as “ministries are far too busy with … emergency administrative problems”(page4) but instead of delegating research to the universities which will be affected by the change, CHED did the freedom (I assumed) to do the research on their own (?) and flunked. This failure to consider and solicit the research capabilities of Higher Education Institutions to pre-evaluate the institutional effects of the change resulted and will continue to result to problems that will disrupt the whole educational institution to which the same is not ready to face. This problem will be aggravated by the fact that most service subjects will be moved to the higher year levels of nursing course, further exacerbating the issue.

Is this an example of “research agenda becoming more policy maker driven and less institution driven”(page 5) which in effect made universities as recipients of the decisions of the CHED as a policy maker and not as participants in the policy generation? FEU and other universities implemented the curricular change – probably they don’t have a choice. Or because they do not have the research capability to prove that the change will spell disaster among their faculty. The universities then are transformed by the CHED memo abruptly (willingly?) without taking “adequate account of the environment it serves, never reaching the core of how” they would “transform themselves” (page 6). In other words, CHED and the Universities failed to think systemically.

The question of focusing “on effectiveness issues rather than efficiency issues” (page 6) as pointed out by Dr. Ordoñez is now put into the limelight. Reshuffling, merging or removing the subjects is not the correct solution to attain effectiveness or efficiency. Will removing and merging and reshuffling the subjects for nursing course result into effective nursing graduates? Probably the best way to resolve this issue of nursing graduates not skillful enough on the job is to probe on the effectiveness of instructional delivery and not increasing the number of years nursing students should spend in the university (that violates efficiency) or removing or merging subjects. While the whole world is gearing towards specialization, CHED wants us to become “jack of all trades, master of none.” In defense of the Liberal arts subjects – the nursing institute and nursing students – at least in FEU – are acting more like prima donnas - that is with liberal arts. What more with lesser liberal arts (this is my own subjective observation)? During the incumbency of Dean Dumadag in the Nursing Institute (FEU) major curricular disruptions were also implemented and we, in the Arts and Sciences were greatly affected. Reacting politically and in relation to the recent amendments to Tax Law that changed the withholding tax schemes for the minimum wage earners – Don’t the non-minimum wage earners feel the exorbitant increases in the price of prime commodities and everything else in the Philippine society that only the minimum wage earners are subjected to the new tax scheme? Is that an example of Class Legislation? Or that the implementation of this CHED memo without considering the repercussions to the other structures of the education sector or without considering the social, economic or political implications a form of shortsightedness among the technocrats in the Commission of Higher Education? Just thinking and reacting!!!