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Academics, Power and
the Crisis of the University by Walden Bello
(based on a speech he gave at Linggo ng
KAPP (College of Social Sciences and Philosophy Week), University of the
Philippines at Diliman, Feb. 15, 2005. )
The article first came out in BusinessWorld on February 21, 2005.
Walden Bello is Professor of Sociology and Public Administration at the
University of the Philippines at Diliman, Quezon City and Executive
Director of Focus on the Global South.
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Academics, Power, and the Crisis of the University
By Walden Bello
There is a tendency to downgrade the influence of the academe on policy
and on power. Indeed, we academics are often faulted for being in an
ivory tower. It would be a mistake for us to believe this. It was
Keynes, I think, who said that behind the most practical of politicians
is the ghost of some half-forgotten philosopher. Academics or, more
broadly, intellectuals have been central to the most influential
movements sweeping civil society in modern and, one must add,
post-modern times. Marx, of course, comes to mind, as does Keynes
himself, the Cambridge don who provided the vital intellectual
underpinnings of the post-World War II system managed capitalist systems
in both the West and the developing world.
More recently, the influence of academia on politicians and policymakers
has been most evident in the massive impact of Milton Friedman and the
University of Chicago School of economics. The political success of the
free market policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the West
is inconceivable without the intellectual foundations provided by the
Chicago School. But even before Thatcher and Reagan, the intellectual
power of the Chicago School had manifested itself in the wholesale
restructuring of the Chilean economy by the so-called "Chicago Boys"
after the 1973 coup initiated by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. From Chile, the
neoliberal revolution went on to capture the citadels of power in most
other countries in Latin America.
Like Latin America, the Philippines was captured by neoliberal
economics.
For those of us who see mainly corruption and the selfish play of
interest groups as the driving force of Philippines politics, the role
of ideas in policymaking may sound quaint. But think again. Over the
last 19 years, we have had a revolution in the Philippines, in case you
did not know it. But this has been a revolution that has come from the
right, not the left. The vanguard of this revolution, which reached its
apogee during the Ramos period, have been economists and technocrats who
captured the highest reaches of the academe, government, and business,
who were united in the belief that if you engaged in free trade, lowered
tariffs, enacted more liberal conditions to attract foreign capital, and
reduced governmental regulation of the economy, the result would be
growth, prosperity, and the end of inequality. Let the market rule-this
was the battle cry of the neoliberal revolution that reached its
climactic point during the presidency of Fidel Ramos.
The ideological character of economic policymaking during the Ramos
period was partly a reaction toward the Marcos regime, which many in the
urban middle and upper-middle classes had identified not only with
dictatorship and the loss of human rights but also with cronyism,
protectionism and rent-seeking. But more important in my view was the
zeitgeist of the Reagan-Thatcher era. Academics and technocrats with
advanced academic training were key in this process, and many of them
had done their graduate work in the late 1970s and 1980s, when
state-oriented Keynesianism lost its luster and neoliberalism came into
vogue not only in the economics departments of US universities but also
in key local institutions such as the School of Economics of the
University of the Philippines and the Center for Research and
Communications (now University of Asia and the Pacific).
The "neoclassification" of the Philippine technocracy reached its apogee
under Ramos not as a result of a sudden coup but of a gradual takeover
of the strategic heights of the technocracy by these
free-market-oriented policymakers coming from the academy, government
and business. In an interview with my associate Joy Chavez Malaluan, one
pivotal figure pointed out that she and her colleagues who played
prominent roles in the country's free-market turn acted not only out of
external pressure from the World Bank and the IMF but out of belief:
"Imposed, maybe in one way, but on the other hand the mainstream
decisionmakers-[the] technocracy and policymakers-also internally
believe in that. So there's a confluence of policy direction Another
figure stressed the emergence of a broader "consensus" among the elite
and middle class around free market reform: "[No] policy reform becomes
credible, workable policies, unless the people accepted. Yes, there were
researchers and economics pushing for that, yes there were donor
communities pushing for that.but ultimately it is a question of whether
the public accept that policy."
In any event, the "neoclassical revolution" had achieved a critical mass
by the time Ramos came to power, and its hegemony was consolidated
during his administration. "It's the dominant sector," one player put
it. "It's the president, it's his chief economic advisers, both formal
and informal; the House of representatives; the Senate-the mainstream.
The mainstream is pushing for liberalization" This player, Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo, was a neoclassical economist and would herself become
president in 2001. One cannot find a better statement of how academic
hegemony imposed itself on our political and economic elites.
Ramos and his allies in government, business and the academy were all
impatient to get the Philippines out of the rut and join the ranks of
the vaunted "Asian tigers." Their view of how their neighbors achieved
success was, however, filtered through their neoclassical ideological
prism. Against much evidence, they saw the high growth rates of the East
Asian and Southeast Asia economies as products of free market policies
instead of strategic state interventions in the market. Typical of this
selective interpretation of the Asia miracle was the following comment
of Jesus Estanislao, Corazon Aquino's secretary of finance, and a Ramos
supporter:"Government takes very good care of macro-economic balances,
takes care of a number of activities like for example infrastructure
development, and leaves everything else to the private sector. And that
is exactly what Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand have done,
and that is what the Philippines should be doing, and we are beginning
to do it."
Ideology thus accounts for the speed with which initiatives aimed at
deregulating, liberalizing, and further privatizing the economy
unfolded.Liberalization was seen to be an essential component of
globalization, a process of global integration of production and markets
that, according to economic pundits local and foreign could only lead to
more prosperity all-around. With the state socialist regimes of Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union having collapsed and the social-democratic,
state-interventionist economy of Sweden in disarray, the ideology of
liberalization seemed irrefutable. The prosperous state-assisted
capitalist regimes of East Asia were, of course, a living contradiction
to the neoliberal credo, but even there, technocrats paid profuse lip
service to free markets as a smokescreen intended to defuse US pressures
on them to open up their markets.
The UP School of Economics and the Neoliberal Revolution
In the Philippines, the bastion of neoliberal thinking has been the
University of the Philippines School of Economics. By the early 1990's
both Keynesian economics and radical economics, with which some faculty
members had identified in the 1970's and 1980's, had been marginalized.
The intellectual cadres of the UP School of Economics, along with their
brethren from UP Los Banos, staffed the key economic agencies of
government, notably the National Economic Development Authority, which
provided strong comprehensive guidance for policymaking at the other
government units. The result was a remarkable continuity in policymaking
from the Cory Aquino administration to the Arroyo governments. As Dr.
Cielito Habito, head of NEDA under Fidel Ramos, put it, "We can expect
every serious candidate [for political office] to obtain economic advice
from largely the same small pool of highly trained ecnomists in the
country (unlike lawyers, there really aren't all that many of us,
believe it or not!)."
The result of this revolutionary policy of liberalization led by
UP-based intellectuals is now clear for all to see: nothing less than an
unmitigated disaster. We have been converted into a net food importing
country.
Employment in agriculture has dropped precipitously. Whole sectors of
our agriculture, such as corn, are in the throes of crisis owing to
imports being dumped on us. As one of our trade negotiators told his
counterparts in Geneva before the Cancun ministerial of the WTO in 2003,
"Our agricultural sectors that are strategic to food and livelihood
security and rural employment have already been destabilized as our
small producers are being slaughtered by the gross unfairness of the
international trading environment. Even as I speak, our small producers
are being slaughtered in our own markets, and even the more resilient
and efficient are in distress."
The results have been equally stark in industry. Doctrinaire
liberalization resulted in multiple bankruptcies and job losses. The
list of industrial casualties is awesome. It includes paper products,
textiles, ceramics, rubber products, furniture and fixtures,
petrochemicals, beverage, wood, shoes, petroleum oils, clothing
accessories, and leather goods. Our textile industry, for instance, has
shrunk from 200 firms in the 1970's to less than ten today.
The undermining of our industry and agriculture, however, has not been
the only negative effect of doctrinaire liberalization. By reducing our
tariffs so radically, we also drastically reduced government revenues,
thus contributing to the fiscal crisis. Probably, the best estimates of
foregone revenue are provided by economist Clarence Pascual of LEARN,
who finds that total foregone revenue rises from P58 billion in 1998 to
P108 billion in 2003, averaging 2.4 per cent of GDP for the period.
These are magnitudes that are, he notes, simply "mind boggling." These
are the magnitudes that led former Finance Secretary Jose Isidro Camacho
to admit the obvious: "The severe deterioration of fiscal performance
from the mid-1990's could be attributed to aggressive tariff reduction."
The crisis of the Philippine economy has been replicated throughout the
world. Neoliberal, free market policies have been correlated with rising
poverty, growing inequality both within and between countries, and
economic stagnation. When it comes to empirical evidence, the battle has
long been won by the critics of neoliberalism.
Opposition to Neo-liberalism
There has been rising opposition to neoliberalism, but that has not come
principally from within the academic community, unlike the case in the
sixties and seventies, when faculty members and students in the arts and
sciences, even within what is now the School of Economics, challenged
modernization theory and conventional development economics with
varieties of nationalist analysis, including the paradigm of nationalist
industrialization. Much of the articulation of the opposition to the
reigning free market model has arisen in civil society outside the
university, among people's organizations, NGO's, the environmental
movement, non-academic intellectuals, and even dissident capitalists
like George Soros.
The following comments may or may not apply to UP, but on the western
university scene, after serving as the base for the renaissance of
Marxism in the sixties and seventies, the social sciences and literature
were drawn in the eighties and nineties to varieties of post-modernist
thinking or, as in the case of sociology, to debating these influences
in other to save sociology's status as a science. This is not to say
that post-structuralist thinking was not radical. Indeed it was, but
radical energies were channeled into intra-university academic politics
rather than towards the outside. As the neoconservative thinker Irving
Kristol expressed it in his classic put-down of the left, post-modernist
radicals in the US shifted their ambitions from seizing political power
to seizing the chairmanship ofthe English Department.
An important element in the decline of opposition to neoliberalism and
the disengagement of many progressive academic intellectuals was, of
course, the collapse of the socialist regimes in Central Europe and
Russia and with it the total collapse of the paradigm of central
planning. This could not but have a negative impact on Marxist analysis,
which had for so long served as the main discourse of radical critique
in many intellectual circles both in the West and in the South.
There was, however, one place where there was resistance to
neoliberalism within the academe, and that was within the field of
political development.
The dispute had to do with the role of the state in development in East
Asia, which was the high growth area in the eighties and nineties. Here
academic analysts like Chalmers Johnson, Alice Amsden, and Robert Wade
led the way in showing how the state in East Asia promoted development
by distorting the market rather than by getting itself out of the way of
the market. This was an important counterattack on the pretensions of
neoliberalism, by academics who felt that the validity of their field,
political economy, or the study of the complex interaction between
political power and economic arrangements, was under threat by a
perspective that saw the state as having little economic role except to
expand the ambit of the market. Important as it was, however, this
counterattack was not able to stop the IMF and the World Bank from
passing off the East Asian newly industrializing countries (NICs) as
products of a miracle of the market and governments from continuing to
adopt neoliberal policies in the belief that they were the key to
development.
For the most part, however, the intellectual resistance to neoliberalism
has been articulated mainly by non-academics or by people who were
non-university activists first and academics second. Susan George and
George Soros exemplify the non-academic intellectuals who performed an
important catalytic role in the struggle against neoliberalism. George
had no academic affiliation, yet her books How the Other Half Dies,
Faith and Credit, and The Lugano Report were on the forefront of the
intellectual critique of neoliberalism. Soros' three books on market
fundamentalism have performed a vital role in discrediting neoliberalism
in more mainstream sectors owing to his status as a successful global
capitalist player.
In the Philippines, the intellectual struggle against neoliberalism is
associated mainly with people like the late Junie Kalaw, Nicanor Perlas,
Sixto Roxas, Maitet Diokno, Men Sta. Ana, Lidy Nacpil, Joseph Lim,
Alejandro Lichauco, and Leonor Briones. There are, of course, more
people that deserve to be named. The common characteristic of these
individuals is that they have pursued their intellectual activism
largely in a non-academic context though they may have maintained
academic links or even held academic positions. This was in large
contrast to the neoliberals, whose power base was really their
intellectual stronghold at the University of the Philippines School of
Economics. The debate between the anti-neoliberals and neoliberals raged
outside, but it barely touched the University of the Philippines.
Indeed, some say, it has been sometime since a debate of earthshaking
intellectual proportions has rocked the university.
The University: Haven of Critical Thinking?
Some would say that the image of the university as a debating society of
rival schools of thought, one that is as hospitable to the left as it is
to the right, is an idealized model that does not fit historical
reality.
Left-wing Cambridge in the 1930's, Berkeley in the 1960's, UP in the
1960's, in this view, were more the exception than the rule. It is not
surprising that the neoliberal revolution began and entrenched itself in
universities like the University of Chicago or UP since, according to
this view, universities, despite their image as catalysts of critical
thinking, are inherently conservative institutions geared at maintaining
the current configuration of economic and political power. This is not,
of course, a simple process, and proponent of this view would be the
first to claim the relative autonomy of the cultural realm.
Nevertheless, in the last instance, they claim, the university promotes
system maintenance.
These critics would go on to cite not only Marx but also Nietzsche who
could only really flourish once he got out of the confines of the
University of Basel. Then there was Jean Paul Sartre, the towering
figure of French existentialism, who stayed away from an academic career
for fear that it would compromise his thinking. These critics would not
deny that radical perspectives can find a foothold in universities but
they would claim that the really innovative work is done on the outside
and only gradually make its way into the university. It is worthwhile
examining these issues with respect to UP. Such an investigation,
carried out with sensitivity, can provide us with very important
insights into the process of the formation of intellectual hegemony both
within and outside university walls.
But whatever the results of this investigation, one thing is
indisputable:the contribution of university-based intellectuals to
elaborating a paradigm or paradigms that break with the reigning
neoliberalism would be greatly appreciated.. Neoliberalism is in crisis,
everywhere. But like the dead hand of the engineer on the throttle of
the speeding train that is about to round the bend, its policies
continue to rule for lack of viable alternatives. Without credible
alternatives, policymakers fall back on the failed policies of
liberalization, deregulation, and privatization despite the empirical
evidence from over two dismal decades. University-based academics,
including those in our college, can provide these alternatives with
solid intellectual foundations. Otherwise, the crisis of neoliberal
ideology may lead not to change but to chaos and stagnation. Crisis, we
must recall, does not always result in the seizure of opportunities.
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