Rethinking education

AUGUST 2019 was life-altering in the sense that I finally agreed to head a local university in the City of Manila. It was not an easy decision because I am a practitioner and not an academician, and I am doing my passion already. But, as the good mayor of the city of Manila reasoned, there is much to fix and build in the city and so, like a trained soldier, we go and embrace the challenges, knowing that the opportunities are plenty.  I bring in the wealth of experience of 35 years, which to my critics is pittance. We launched Education 4.0 as the repositioning strategy for the Universidad de Manila or UDM. From the lens of a practitioner, it is clear that higher education’s purposes are to produce graduates that the industry needs and adapt with the changing times. Innovation is key and digitization its driver.

There is a difference between an academic and an academician, which was drilled to me early on, while I was teaching full-time at the National College of Public Administration of the University of the Philippines Diliman in the late 1990s. An academic is a “person who teaches and does research in a university.” An academician is “usually a member of an academy that is concerned with the arts or sciences.” I would rather remain a practitioner where much emphasis is given to praxis than be in an ivory tower.