Professionals past and future
One distinctive aspiration that Filipinos all have is to raise sons and daughters and provide them a good education. The very Filipino goal was to have most, if not all, of your children become “professionals” — doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, architects. There is a history to this and a future, too, that is important for our nation to progress. Professionals must weigh in to the current reality of a few bright spots of heroism fighting to escape pervasive black holes of politics and barbarism.
Last Monday I and nine other professionals from various fields were feted by the Philippine Federation of Professional Associations (PFPA) at a Manila Hotel dinner. We were given awards for excellence as recognition for our work in the practice of our respective professions. The PFPA is the umbrella organization representing 43 different professions and about two million Filipino professionals regulated by the Philippine Regulation Commission.
I excerpt below from my own speech in response to the awards and on behalf of the 10 awardees that included Dr. Willie Ong, fellow columnist from The Philippine STAR; Dr. Cezar Mamaril, agronomist and formerly of the IRRI; Roland Lyle Duque, occupational therapist; Dr. Priscilla M. Torres, pharmacist; Dr. Divina Lourdes R. Reyes, optometrist; interior designer Gerry Contreras, former national president of the Philippine Institute of Interior Designers; and architect Robert Sac, former national president of the United Architects of the Philippines. I represented the Philippine Association of Landscape Architects.
Guest of honor was Ambassador Kristie Kenney of the United States of America. The dinner was hosted by the PFPA represented by Rear Admiral Adonis Donato, president of the PFPA, with PRC Commissioner Ruth Padilla as chair of the board of judges that selected us 10 awardees.
When I got news of the award I shared it with my lovely wife, Twink, a professional broadcast journalist for ANC. She reminded me (and of course nowadays she has to remind me about almost everything) of the classical definition of a professional — that of being one who has passed a four-year university course and licensure examination — a definition her mother, Cely, a professional psychologist who worked for the US Embassy, gave her years ago when she was choosing a career.
The fact that we all could choose our careers is something we have to thank our hardworking parents for. I never really understood why the word “parents” was always prefaced by “hardworking,” until I became one myself — and mainly when the bills for the kids’ tuition fees came due.
We also have to be thankful for the fact that most of our parents themselves are or were professionals, and served, as mine did, as our role models. My parents are both doctors (they were in the audience and I thanked them) and on behalf again of my co-awardees, we thank all our parents.
Most of us are, in fact, third- or fourth-generation professionals with many following in our parents or relatives’ footsteps. I am glad that Ambassador Kenney is here, for the first steps to the establishment of modern professions in the Philippines can be traced to the initiatives of the American colonial civil government. We have to give our thanks to America for the legacy of education, starting in 1901 with the Thomasite teachers and the establishment of a public school system. And two years later in 1903, with the Pensionado program, which produced the first Filipino professionals.
The project, conceived by governor general and later American President William Howard Taft and educator Alexander Sutherland, was to fill the colony’s need for teachers, doctors, engineers, agronomists and lawyers. Over 200 pensionados between 1903 and 1916, with another 800 or so until the outbreak of the Second World War, were given fellowships in US colleges and universities, after which they returned to render service to the country.
These pensionados formed the backbone of the Philippine civil service, the core of educators who would head the new University of the Philippines and other educational institutions, and the vanguard of many professions needed to bring the country into a fast-evolving world. From the ranks of the pensionados came the luminaries of 20th-century Philippine history with the likes of Jorge Bocobo, Jose Abad Santos, Esteban Abada, General Vicente Lim, Dr. Antonio Sison, Dr. Olivia Salamanca, Tomas Mapua, Conrado Benitez, Delfin Jaranilla, and Bienvenido Santos.
From this initial batch of professionals, many of whom transferred their knowledge and education through new institutions, came those like my grandparents from my mother’s side, Dr. Jose Gonzalez, UST Medicine 1917 and Gregoria Martinez, UP Pharmacy 1923. They established a pre-war pharmacy and developed a well-known medicine for stomach disorders. Postwar parity brought in US drug companies and spelled the death of small local medicine manufacturers. My grandmother had passed away before the war and after my grandfather turned to writing (probably where I got my writing genes). He went on to be a published author of short stories in Filipino and even had a novella turned into an LVN film.
On my father’s side was Juan Alcazaren Sr., UP Law 1916. Lolo Juan was a congressman for Cebu in the pre-commonwealth era and headed the School of Law at the University of Manila until the war. After independence he served in various capacities in government including the Bureau of Lands, the Department of Natural Resources and his last post as undersecretary of foreign affairs. My Lola Azon did not go to college but nevertheless was a professional cake maker who taught ladies of the Diplomatic Corps pastry and cake making and decoration. My first sense of architecture was from learning how to stack cake layers and embellish them with icing.
The next generation of professionals includes my parents, both UP Medicine 1952: Dr. Juan Alcazaren Jr., a pioneer in sports and rehabilitation medicine, and Dr. Rolinda Gonzalez, who taught medicine for over 30 years at the University of the East. That generation also includes my in-laws Catalino Macaraig, UP Law 1952, former UP Law professor and executive secretary of President Cory Aquino and Araceli Andaya, UP Psychology, also 1952.
We stand on the shoulders of all these professionals and our parent/professionals who came before us. Our responsibility is to continue their legacy of service to family, community and nation. However, our task is today more complex as the world around us is changing faster than we can imagine — not only from the point of climate change, which is an issue dealt directly by my chosen profession, landscape architecture and urban design — but also from the point of globalized economics, precarious geo-politics and the trans-national struggle to accommodate diverse world cultures and faiths.
As Filipino professionals, I find that it is time to take a long, hard look at our roles in the continuing project of Philippine modernity, to situate it within the fluid context of the real world. As specialties and diversification in the professions increase (there are 43 professions in the PFPA) and this is my personal view, we see the inclination get professionally parochial and introverted; shutting out larger society and contact with other professions.
There is a tendency for professional associations to become exclusively social clubs, more engrossed with the pomp and pageantry of events, back-slapping camaraderie and the wearing of jackets and medallions. This more than any substantial communal reflection on how their professions are changing, how to encourage young people to take up the professions, instead of selling their souls to call centers or the call of foreign shores and what professionals can really do to combat the Philippine malaise.
The events of Ondoy and Pepeng have served to give us professionals notice that we need band together once more, to look at the bigger picture, to refocus and craft socially inclusive, multi-disciplinary solutions to the problems of increasing natural calamity, hazards, vulnerability and dwindling natural and social resources. The recent disasters point not to acts of God but sins of omission, and failure to communicate and coordinate among those of us professionally responsible for both the physical and social constructs within which we live. Many of us professionals fail to apply ourselves to important tasks, preferring instead to apply for visas, so our services benefit other peoples in other lands.
Another fact highlighted by the events of the last few months is that our public, the people who we serve, our clients, public and corporate, need to better understand and appreciate our abilities and capacities as professionals. We need to rebuild their trust in us. This we can do through institutions like the PFPA, its four councils and our own individual, but hopefully soon more-networked, professional organizations.
Even before the typhoons, professionals have been constantly buffeted by the winds of globalization. For the past two decades we have seen countless foreign professionals and professional firms come and practice illegally and with impunity mainly in architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, planning, and engineering. There have been reports of encroachments in other fields like accounting, business and finance and naval architecture.
I came back in 2002 from 12 years of professional work overseas so I could share my expertise, only to find that all too often, for big projects, I and many like me in the design, planning and engineering professions have to play second fiddle to foreign consultants. They are paid up to 10 times more than Filipino professionals. Even in foreign financial institution-backed projects there is no parity for Filipino professionals. The PFPA and the PRC and the government, as well as all professionals, need to disabuse our clients of the notion that foreign consultants are better.
Whenever I can, and to whoever cares to listen, I point out the fact that many building projects tout themselves as “green and sustainable” but hire foreign consultants whom clients have to fly over thousands of kilometers per meeting. These consultants hypocritically espouse greenness while burning tons of carbon just to come here to design structures and landscapes that Filipino consultants can do better (many of us have international credentials and experience). These foreign professionals also push “green” building products and technologies that again counter the whole point of sourcing locally. Besides, many of them are used to designing for temperate climes and their own cultures, not our tropical hot and wet climates and the Filipinos’ distinctive use of space.
We can also improve people’s trust and perception by shoring up the education of our future young professionals. We need to reduce their vulnerability to global change by improving their skill sets, base competencies and EQ — not to change curricula to suit the demands of market-driven exportation of labor, or the commodification of intellectual resource in BPOs. We need to bring their education and mindset back to the basics: that of a love for knowledge, a drive for excellence and a sense of civic responsibility.
To quote our world-class boxing professional Manny Pacquiao, “With great power comes great responsibility … you know.” Filipino professionals have the power, honed by years of training and struggle, to do excellent work and institute transformations within their respective fields, and together, the larger social, economic, political and physical landscape of the Philippines.
We, as professionals, pursue not just a means to earn a living but a goal of improving the quality of our lives and the quality of the lives of generations to Filipinos to come. We must take the mantle of heroism. We must encourage the young once again, because of our example, to aspire to become professionals.
We, by definition, are more than our university degrees and licenses. We, and the young professionals we train, are the future of this country. Filipino professionals must profess this fact and most importantly, an unwavering belief in themselves and their professions — for the Filipino professional is “pound for pound” the best in the world.”
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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.
