Research or the lack of it

Napoleon K. Juanillo of the Commission on Higher Education gave a talk last week at the “Copy & Repro: International Conference on IP Policies & Copyright Licensing for Schools and Universities” held at the SMX.

He gave five reasons Philippine Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are very poor in research: “poor institutional infrastructure, limited scale and critical mass, academic staff often without necessary prerequisites, not traditionally resourced for research, and academic workload tensions.”

Let me elaborate on each one.

Poor institutional infrastructure. Many HEIs do not even have a research office, let alone a research agenda. In theory, a mission or vision statement determines the research agenda. Forced by economics to offer as many in-demand courses as possible, many HEIs open programs that have nothing to do with what they originally planned to achieve, as articulated in their mission and/or vision statements. (A simple example is a computer school offering nursing.)

Even if an HEI has a research office and even a research agenda, it is not likely that it will put money where its mouth is. Much of the operating budget of an HEI is eaten up by salaries and overhead, rather than research. Research is very expensive. A simple survey, for example, involves hiring people to go around collecting and collating data, traveling from one place to another, having experts validate the survey instrument, buying expensive software to make sense out of the data gathered, and so on.

Even a research project that aims at producing, say, a novel, involves allowing someone to sit down and think, perhaps for hours, weeks, even months on end. We are not even talking of a historical novel, which would require travel to various libraries, sometimes even libraries in other countries, to gather background material on characters and plots.

In other words, the budget for research in our HEIs is often woefully inadequate, because many (if not most) administrators cannot see the value of someone publishing something in a high-impact, ISI or Scopus-listed academic journal or going to another country to read a paper in a high-level conference.

Limited scale and critical mass. Even if an HEI does value research and allots a huge amount of money for it, it is bound by the academic calendar or its fiscal year to think only of short-term projects. The big universities in the world engage in projects that last for years, not for an academic year or two. These big projects also involve a number of scholars, not only one or two. We do not have, even in our best HEIs, research teams that can work for years on only one research problem. We lack the critical mass of researchers.

Academic staff often without necessary prerequisites. It is a truism in research universities that the minimum qualification to be a researcher is a doctorate. There are very few Filipino scholars with doctorates. As Juanillo said, many of these doctorates were earned only for the sake of earning a doctorate, not for the sake of preparing to do research. As Brother Andrew Gonzales always said, a scholar’s work begins after, not before or during doctoral studies.

Not traditionally resourced for research. I have talked about research funds, but funds are not all that good research needs. Researchers need equipment, hardware and software in the case of all researchers, laboratories in the case of researchers in the sciences. Researchers need space for research, whether this space is full of expensive equipment or isolated enough to give a peaceful atmosphere for the researcher who is thinking. Very few researchers in HEIs even have their own rooms. Most non-classrooms are reserved for administrators, who have no time for research.

Academic workload tensions. In many HEIs, research is given deloading. This means that, instead of teaching 4 or 7 classes, researchers are made to teach only a couple of classes. This, however, makes absolutely no sense. A researcher is working on a highly sophisticated level, in a virtual community of the best scholars in the world. When a researcher is forced to stoop down to the level of undergraduate or even graduate students (“stoop down” is the precise term!), his or her mind shifts to a very unsophisticated level. Unless the researcher is bipolar or schizophrenic, there is no way to maintain the focus and concentration required by high-level thinking.

Sad to say, many of our best researchers are even conscripted to be administrators. This is the kiss of death for researchers. Research needs huge blocks of time, which no administrator ever has.

Why all this talk about research? Not only for bragging rights (because all international rankings demand high levels of research), but also for national development. Unless our country produces original research, we will always be consumers of knowledge, rather than producers of it. In the world of research, we are the domestic helpers of the world: scholars in other countries engage in cutting edge research, while we do the everyday tasks of data gathering, state-of-the-art surveys, applying research results to practical problems, that sort of thing.

Juanillo said all this diplomatically. I will say it in undiplomatic language: Without research, many of our HEIs are a joke.