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.
====================
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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