A professor in a university breathes a deep sigh as she submits her tenth research paper for the year, her office lined with piles of journals that never reach the hands of anyone outside the academe. Another professor rushes to submit a proposal—not because he thinks it’s significant, but because promotions and incentives endlessly require a string of publications. Meanwhile in Vietnam and Thailand, farmer-scientists are reaping bountiful harvests of high-yielding rice varieties they have bred, shipping tons of farm produce abroad.
This is the bitter truth of Philippine academe—quality takes second fiddle to quantity, and application comes afterthought. Research has become a numbers game, a call for professional ranking, university budgets, and institutional prestige. Rather than answering critical national issues, most studies exist solely to enhance résumés, meet quotas, and swell metrics in international academic rankings. The consequence? A gold mine of research gathering dust on library shelves, as the nation wrestles with the very issues that these studies purport to solve.
Our universities were once the thinking centers of Southeast Asia. Thai and Vietnamese students poured into the Philippines to learn agricultural science, hoping to bring home something that would revolutionize their farms. Now, those nations are agricultural giants, nourishing their people and selling excess produce abroad, while our farmers are neck-deep in debt, burdened by traditional ways and inefficient policies. What went wrong? We never bridged the gap between practice and research. We continue to write papers as others are applying what they learned in the field.
This obsession with how much research has produced a system in which relevance is secondary. Students and professors create studies that are sound methodologically but irrelevant in the field—scholarly exercises in a vacuum. Whether or not a research project has any effect in the real world is not even queried. What is important is that it’s published in some journals, referenced a few times, and contributed to the endless stack of intellectual artifacts that never see the light of day outside the university walls.
It is not that the Philippines is short of great minds or revolutionary ideas. We have them—lots of them. But ideas, however great, are worthless if they’re not translated into action. If research remains at the fringes of academic journals without reaching the farmers, manufacturers, or even policymakers, then why bother? Other nations already reap the fruits of their applied research. Here, we remain at the feasibility study stage for things that could have been done decades earlier.
Some groups and individuals might grumble that the process is slow and tiresome; research cannot be helped before implementation. But how long do we require? How many additional studies do we have to carry out before we recognize that we are going round and round in circles? The problem is not time—it’s the gap between theory and practice. Universities are isolated islands where research is an end, not a means of national development. The link between knowledge and action is missing.
It’s time to redefine research. We need to focus less on publication, and more on fixing things. Change academic rewards from impact numbers to impact weight. Make better matches between industry and universities, researchers and government. Move away from passive production towards active solution-seeking. We want research that makes roads, grows plants, purifies waters, and changes people’s lives—not just research that substantiates journal pages.
The world isn’t waiting for the indecisive. As we are busy wrapping ourselves around mountains of research, other groups and individuals have already transformed study into action, and we’re left to watch from the sidelines. The time has come to change this trend. The Philippines doesn’t need more research papers—it needs to apply research results.
