For the longest time, there has been whining about the so-called “disconnect” between academe and industry. The graduates of colleges and universities, it has repeatedly been complained, are not exposed to industry and are ill-suited for it. So, the theory goes, academe must be more responsive to industry and to practice. Now, really, must it?
I believe, with many others, that schooling should prepare students for work—and that includes introducing them to the workplace—but far be it from me to lend approval to the obnoxious proposition that all that there is to schooling is preparing for a living. If schooling does not prepare for life—which should definitely be more than just making a living unless one’s soul is completely emaciated—then it is without doubt a waste of a good part of one’s earthly sojourn and of money. If it equips students with shrewdness and guile by which to rake in profit, but leaves them short on virtue and adrift without a moral compass, then it would be rightly detested as the conspiracy of profiteers!
Lately, many academic departments have retrofit their courses not only to make on-the-job-training mandatory, but to have as preferred professors and lecturers practitioners and industry men and women. I appreciate the endeavor at establishing a connection, but I detest the assumption that practice is to be preferred over theory. Unless an engineering dean has gone completely bonkers, there is no justification for him to hire a very skilled auto mechanic who learned his craft by apprenticing with his father to teach subjects of auto mechanics in a mechanical engineering program, for instance. Many things work and just because someone is an expert at getting things working does not render him qualified to teach! It is one thing for things to work by happenstance—because one has chanced upon the correct maneuvers—and it is quite another to get things going because one knows the theory by which things move!
Corporations provide a good example. It is one thing to teach corporation law right from the code, aided by some mediocre commentary. From the provisions of the code alone, however, one really has no idea how shares are bought and sold, what the role of a brokerage firm is and how mergers and acquisitions in fact take place—the gore and the clangor of it all. But it is quite another matter to insist that corporate managers, directors, stock brokers and players of the stock market take over the classrooms, after all they have the “practice”! Let us not overrate practice—which many times is merely the repetition of the expedient, the perpetuation of habit, the sedimentation of the results of serendipity! Will the practice that is so undeservedly prized include the astuteness by which corporate managers mulct as much as they can from corporate employees while keeping workers’ benefits to the barest minimum, in defiance of the spirit of social justice? Shall education of our business administration and management students include familiarizing them with the practice of insider trading that is really illegal but is so frequently practiced in the corporate world? And with what credibility can we get our students to own the precepts of the code of corporate governance when the “industry people” and corporate executives whom we set on our academic pedestals are exemplars at circumventing the requirements of ethical governance and success stories at putting on the simulacra of righteousness?
Or take the transportation industry. Why should transport executives who have mastered every device at short-changing passengers or shippers while managing to keep a run-down enterprise going for no other reason than that the hapless patrons have no other choice teach the future generation how to do things better? And why should ambassadors and consuls, many of whom receive their positions and titles because of political connections despite their abysmal ignorance of international law and international politics and international economics be turned to for expert advise, counsel and instruction when all that they are experts at is ambivalence and double-talk?
Long before there were schools of business, there were merchants, and long before there were maritime academies, there were seafarers and ocean-going vessels and their crew. And long before law schools there were lawyers—rhetoricians really, and orators who wooed the crowds into voting for the conviction or the acquittal of accused persons, regardless of guilt or innocence, but swayed considerably by the sonority or turned off by the stammering of an advocate. So why did these practices need to be reviewed, revisited, formalized, structured in classrooms and in schools? Because good practice needs good theory, and practice without theory is hardly anything more than guesswork and good old trial-and-error. And that is why it pays—and handsomely—to have corps of academics and theoreticians untainted, untamed and unsullied by the short-cuts, the cunning and calculation, the corruption and decadence of practice, no matter how successful! There is need to be reminded, as Alasdair MacIntyre has, that success is itself value-neutral. It is virtue that makes all the difference. There are successful thieves and drug lords and plunderers and plagiarists, but there can be no virtuous thief, drug lord or malefactor!
Yes, we need the connection between academe and industry—but practitioners too need to be taught by academics the theories that underlie their practice, and to be told why their practices sometimes, in fact often, go awry, and where the expedient and practical are downright unethical and indecent proposals!
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@yahoo.com