What state universities should spend on

THE University of Zurich's decision to withdraw from the Times Higher Education ranking system received and enjoyed wide publicity — a sure indicator that this persuasion struck a resonant chord in many, educators and academics particularly. The university reached the decision because it discerned — quite rightly, to my mind — that the ranking system was no longer evaluating universities as they should be reckoned. It had reduced university education to a set of quantitative indicators — missing entirely the whole point of university education."Universitas magistrorum et scholarium"... a gathering of masters and students. This was the medieval conviction upon which universities rose, and it continues to capture the essence of university education. While guilds and craftsmen taught apprentices the various productive and useful crafts — the predecessors of Tesda — the universities were busy with something else. Here, scholars in disciplines such as philosophy, theology, law and, later, medicine and the nascent sciences gathered "scholars" — eager students — about them, discussed their theories, advanced their propositions, engaged in scholastic disputation, and formed the hearts and wills of many who would go on to change the course of history by the sheer power of thought.That is my problem with the present evaluative tools that the blighted Commission on Higher Education (CHEd), apparently suffering from a serious deficit in creative intelligence, relies on. Take "SUC Leveling." This is an artifice by which the CHEd classifies state universities and colleges into five levels on the basis of criteria that include "productivity." "transfer of skills to the community" and "population" — the latter, on the patently absurd theory that "the more, the better." It should be clear to anyone with a sound understanding of the nature of a university that if it is the development of useful technologies that are desired and their transfer to the community, then you do not turn to universities. That is exactly what technological institutes are for — and they serve a very useful purpose in community life but are distinct from universities.If, besides the concerns of genuine academic scholarship, one requires a state university to provide for itself, you lay upon it a burden that impedes the relentless pursuit of what should be the genuine concerns of a university. Then, you constrain what should be the boundless freedom of the university and compel it to busy itself with the production of what is marketable. Much of the sublime that universities throughout history have engendered has no market value. What, for example, is the price tag one can place on the rarefied theories of physics born of the great minds at Cambridge University? One then understands why the University of Zurich — as well as other notable universities — have their misgivings about ratings and rankings.In its myopic typology that classifies centers of learning as colleges, professional schools and universities, CHEd has perverted the notion of a university. The title is not the reward given for attaining a pre-determined number of points along some pathetic array of "key result areas." It is a different creature altogether. A university is what arises when men and women of superior intelligence write their books and dissertations, expound on them to all who are willing to listen and gather about them students who are truly eager to learn. Even the very concept of "research" has been mangled by CHEd and the ranking institutions it recommends. It is required, for example, that one's research be published in a so-called high-impact journal, and research will be scored highly according to the number of citations it receives — the number of times it is "cited" (read: copied) by other researchers. Since mediocrity is more prevalent than superior intelligence, then mediocre articles and publications will be cited more frequently by the mediocre! Michael Polanyi has very correctly emphasized that scientific research is a free enterprise, and that when it is regulated and directed — as CHEd wishes it to be — it is stymied and it atrophies. It seems that CHEd has adopted some "Quasimodo" version of pragmatism with the result that there is neither room nor credit for such endeavors as music, the humanities and art — the very hallmarks of universities that the world has held in greatest esteem.It is my fond wish that those who head universities hew their institutions along the patterns laid out by the greatest minds and most intrepid spirits in higher education, that they pay less attention to scoring flattering points and pay greater heed to what makes a university truly distinct and truly useful: that atmosphere of freedom that gives free rein to the spirit of inquiry and offers students the opportunity to sit at the feet of masters and to become masters themselves. In settling for the immediately quantifiable and monetizable, rating and ranking systems have traded the immeasurable power of idea and theory, the beauty and the sublimity of the kingdom of the humanities — arts, music and letters for a measly bowl of pottage!rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.phrannie_aquino@csu.edu.phrannie_aquino@outlook.com