Most of us are espousing the notion that urbanization is a good thing—an indicator of progress and development. Little do we realize that some of its features are rather injurious to the environment and contribute to people’s suffering.
The city of Tacloban being the center of commerce and development in the region could be a classic example. As a result of the seemingly endless expansion activities, most suburbs that were once covered with thickets are now converted into subdivisions, commercial districts, factories, gigantic hardware, malls, and other infrastructures.
A land trip before from Palo to Tacloban and vice versa would allow passengers to catch sight of plains, rice fields, and other uninhabited agricultural lands. Houses were rare and distant from one another then. But now, homes and buildings are crowding the sides of the highway, extending inland as more and more structures proliferate. These two places are now connected by buildings of all sorts.
What’s wrong with this, then? Shouldn’t the people be happy that progress is occurring and that the places are getting more urbanized? Supposedly, they should be, if only some consequences are addressed.
Take this for instance: before the subdivisions and other infrastructures had mushroomed, swamps that served as catch basins of water from the mountains and of rainwater were functional. But now, these waters are trapped and cannot exit to the sea due to the filling materials that people had dumped into their natural paths. This explains why some places are continually flooded, with the water lingering on, with nowhere to flow to.
The ever-increasing volumes of garbage each day, moreover, is another headache resulting from the growing city population. We can list down other disadvantages of an urbanizing metropolis, but that’s not the main point as it is expected. But we hope that town and city officials would make allowances for such growth because, as urbanization expands, the need to address its demands likewise increases.
Doctors as theorists
I just posted on my FB account that academic doctors, those holders of the highest academic degrees, should cease being mere researchers for life. Instead, they should become theorists in their respective fields.
By becoming doctors in their fields of discipline, they have assumed the ranks as creators and originators of ideas, principles, and theories. This means that they had embarked on that level when they should not anymore be content with just citing and recycling other people’s ideas—they should create their own and have it disseminated.
This makes such a position a thing to behold with awe, for it’s a rare one among the many vocations that people can pursue. Being a dignified status in society, a doctorate is something we look up to. And as such, we regard it with many expectations, with its holders supposedly behaving, in word and in deed, that they really deserve that status.
Why should academic doctors not dwell on conducting research for life? Well, it’s not supposedly for them anymore, given their elevated position in the knowledge hierarchy. It’s rightfully for the graduate and undergraduate levels that are still exploring the vastness of knowledge. Research is simply finding the gaps and gray areas that previous studies had missed, and trying to bridge those gaps.
Leave the graduate and undergraduate students alone to do this job. It’s quite inappropriate for academic doctors to be still preoccupied with this activity. They may engage in it once in a while, but never as a central preoccupation, zeroing in on it. Moreover, their research should be more of claims and stands. In short, they should be theorizing on things characteristic of their fields knowing that, as doctors, they have assumed mastery and expertise in those disciplines.
In what way can academic doctors do this? Well, they can write academic papers detailing their original theories and have these published in academic journals. These are the kind of papers that they should produce, not just correlational studies that have been duplicated and imitated perhaps millions of times worldwide.
Let me cite some examples from my own theorizing works, which are mostly published in international journals and have been read by thousands of readers. For my doctoral dissertation, I theorized that an editorial cartoon, though single-framed unlike comic illustrations, is a narrative item, complete with the elements of the story. In a paper published in an international journal, I theorized that research and academic papers, which are traditionally penned in a strictly formal language, can be better written using feature style for ease and interesting reads.
I can cite more examples even from other people’s works, but I guess I have driven home the point that academic doctors of our time, should be creating new ideas rather than just reviewing the literature. That’s not to pick up a quarrel—it’s to challenge them.