The De La Salle University professor who famously lambasted in a Facebook post the actress Agot Isidro for her “shallow understanding of international relations” is set to visit the campus next month to speak at a forum being organized by the Department of Political Science of the College of Arts and Social Sciences.
Political scientist Dr. Antonio Contreras will be here on November 10 as one of two resource speakers for the department’s forum entitled, “Policy Shifts in National Governance,” to be held at the Amphitheater of the College of Engineering and Technology.
Contreras reacted to Isidro’s viral post where the actress said that President Rodrigo Duterte was a “psychopath” and that the Philippines would probably starve if the United States should leave.
Contreras’s Facebook post, which lectured Isidro on international relations and contained an offer for a free consultation on political literacy, generated a lot of attention, and was picked up by news agencies and shared all over social media.
Contreras will speak at the forum together with Dr. Clarita R. Carlos of the University of the Philippines.
Carlos is a professor at the Department of Political Science of UP and the executive director of the Center for Political and Democratic Reform, Inc. She is the former president of the National Defense College of the Philippines.
The forum, which is organized by the political science department in collaboration with the Department of Research of the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Extension (OVCRE) aims to arrest people’s growing reliance on certain inaccurate sources of information regarding policies of the new administration.
It will stress the importance of sourcing information from persons in authority rather than from sources like social media to ensure that people understand the thrust of the government.
The holding of the forum is considered timely by the organizers in light of the changes sweeping the landscape brought on by Duterte’s election and the accompanying confusion regarding government policies due to misinformation and disinformation.
In a joint letter to Chancellor Sukarno Tanggol, department chairperson Atty. Felicidad Gadiano and Institute Director for Research Dr. Franco Teves expressed concern over people’s practice of gathering information “from just anywhere or anybody else” regarding new government policies and their implementation.
“We believe that the holding of this forum is timely and imperative in view of the radical changes in policies implemented by the new administration under the leadership of President Duterte,” the two said.
A program that will enable centralized management of tasks such as tracking inventory levels and stock locations was launched yesterday at the conference room of IIT’s Supply and Property Management Division (SPMD).
The launching of the Warehouse Management System (WMS) at the SPMD was attended by Institute cost center heads and representatives from the Commission on Audit headed by State Auditor III Ms Gina Perpetua R. Baul.
The WMS is an application that is developed by the Information Communication Technology Center (ICTC) in cooperation with the SPMD.
SPMD officer-in-charge Monawira A. Ali wrote that the aim of the WMS is to provide efficient and effective control and monitoring of the movement of supplies and materials within the SPMD warehouse.
“It will also make available to the management updated information needed in decision-making,” she added.
As it has dawned upon the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS) that theses and dissertations should not be made to just sit out their existence in shelves after the students who wrote them have graduated, it decided to organize a seminar-workshop for both faculty and graduate students to introduce the concept of extracting several journal papers from one academic paper.
The CASS, through the editorial board of its official journal, Langkit, held a one-day Seminar-Workshop on How to Derive Journal Articles from Thesis/Special Project/Dissertation yesterday at the Institute boardroom.
“We want to utilize these academic papers so they can be published, and not just put them in shelves,”
Langkit Journal editor-in-chief and Department of English chairperson Dr. Nelia G. Balgoa said.
Balgoa believes that if the exercise is also taken as a collaborative effort between faculty and graduate student, it could increase the research output of the CASS.
The seminar-workshop featured a talk entitled, From Research Manuscripts to Journal Articles – A Personal Account given by retired IIT professor Dr. L.C. Sevidal-Castro.
Sevidal-Castro is one of the pioneering faculty members and administrators of MSU-IIT. She was the first dean of the School of Arts and Humanities (SAH) now known as CASS, and the immediate past editor-in-chief of the Langkit Journal.
The workshop portion of the activity saw participants trying out their hand at “deriving” journal papers from an academic paper, and having these critiqued later in the afternoon.
The critiquing part, according to Balgoa, was also very important as they had discovered that many faculty and graduate students still needed to learn how to write a several-paged journal article vis-a-vis the “big-book” -style thesis.
“We want to capacitate them and arm them with the right skills so that they can improve the quality of their papers, and increase their chances of having these accepted for publication,” Balgoa said.
In a meeting that nearly never was, MSU-IIT’s Corps of Campus Ambassadors managed to catch the Miss Earth candidates during their brief sojourn to the Institute yesterday and impressed the visiting beauty queens so much for the latter to praise the ambassadors’ articulateness.
Five Campus Ambassadors engaged in a brief conversation the 10 Ms Earth candidates who arrived onboard an Iligan City government tourism bus at 2:40 p.m.
The Campus Ambassadors also handed out MSU-IIT brochures and copies of the Institute newsletter, Gazette, to the candidates who came from the countries of Chinese Taipei, Iraq, Denmark, Romania, Zimbabwe, Chile, Pakistan, Belize, England, and Hungary
However, the Campus Ambassadors were not able to give the visitors a tour of the campus as the City Tourism office, the agency in charge of the Ms Earth candidates’ stay in Iligan, did not plan to let the group stay long in IIT.
In fact, the candidates were seemingly just on a drive-by tour of the Institute, and skipped paying a courtesy call at the Chancellor’s Office where the Chancellor, Institute officials, and employees had been expecting them since 2 p.m.
Many of the employees waiting at the Office of the Chancellor, some with cameras at the ready, were very disappointed.
City tourism officials blamed the gaffe on an alleged miscommunication.
The Campus Ambassadors who were pulled out of their classes yesterday for the Ms Earth visit were nevertheless, happy for the experience of meeting – however briefly – other ambassadors from different countries campaigning for a greener Earth.
The Campus Ambassadors are an elite group of IIT students formed under the Campus Ambassador Program of the Office of Publication and Information (OPI). Students admitted to the program are evaluated for intelligence, articulateness, and leadership abilities.
