Dr. Arnulfo P. Azcarraga
Conferred AY 2017-2018
A Personal Story..
By Arnulfo “Arnie” Azcarraga
I had always wanted to be in the academe. The plan in my youth was to have a Ph.D. from the US by the age of 27, and then teach.
Back in the day, I was accumulating a composite of profiles of teachers that I admired for very specific traits and practices – to lecture and engage like teacher A, to give out perplexing but well-constructed exams like teacher B, to have a full life outside of teaching like teacher C, to be strict, serious, but approachable like teacher D, to be a well-rounded person like teacher E, and all other bits and pieces of traits and teaching methods from specific teachers. And just as important, to avoid specific practices that I have had the misfortune of experiencing, in case, one day, I will be a teacher myself.
And it did happen. I did get a Ph.D. from abroad. From France, not from the US. And finished at the age of 31, not 27.
August 1993, returning from the French Alps, I joined DLSU. Since then, I have had the privilege to teach several generations of undergraduate and graduate students, and have supervised numerous undergraduate thesis groups, and many Master of Science and PhD Computer Science and Information Technology graduates. A good number of them are now full-time faculty members of the College of Computer Studies.
I do not think that I have truly succeeded at becoming the composite ideal teacher that I had imagined. But I did keep a few promises to myself since way back in College at the University of the Philippines in Los Baños. All the exams that I have given at DLSU were open-notes, open-books. And I have also made sure that all the grades I gave were based on a tedious evaluation of the students’ individual performance in my class. All scores that were very close to my cut-off thresholds for each grade, I carefully re-reviewed, so students did not need to come to me to plead for just a few points here and there to get a slightly better grade. As one can imagine, I so liked the practice at La Salle where teachers needed to be in a designated classroom, at a designated hour during “grade distribution”, and should be able to explain the detailed basis for each grade that they gave.
I was quite confident that I would get my PhD from a school abroad, from the US, by the time I turned 27. I imagined myself like a horse, with side patches for both eyes, so I could only look forward. I did get admitted for an MS Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, armed with a UNDP scholarship. But it was getting late for Spring of 1986 and so I was advised to wait for the Fall semester instead. With the Marcos-Cory snap election looming, I thought that anything could happen between late 1985 and Fall of 1986, and so I instead took the DAAD German scholarship to study MS Computer Science at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok. I started school there just before the snap elections.
Fast forward to early 1993. I was ready to defend my dissertation and had begun checking out my post-PhD options. At that time, a post-doc was a natural immediate step after a Ph.D. I reached out to Professor Kunihiko Fukushima of Osaka University, and I proposed to add a learning component to his NeoCognitron model. He readily agreed to take me in as his Post-Doc student. I then wrote to the Japanese Embassy in Paris and inquired about the Monbusho Scholarship. I was advised to return to Manila and apply from my home country. And so I did.
That post-doc stint in Osaka University under a Monbusho scholarship never happened. I had, in fact, been awarded the scholarship, and had the formal acceptance from Professor Fukushima, and yet, at some point, my scholarship did not materialize. The Japanese embassy in Manila, seemingly embarrassed by what happened, offered me an Asahi Shinbun scholarship instead, for the same post-doc stint. Again, everything went well until at some point, the scholarship got withdrawn. For some reason, my scholarship was officially blocked at some late stage of the scholarship-awarding process. I never really got to fully uncover what truly happened. Although, through all these decades with DLSU, I can sort of imagine what really happened.
As an aside, the Neocognitron is one of the pre-cursor neural network models that led to Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) that are widely in use today. I went to a large Neural Network conference in Kyoto in 2016, and Prof. Fukushima presented his latest work on the Neocognitron. There it was, he gave the NeoCognitron the ability to learn!
As an another aside, I worked on the strengthening the DLSU-Osaka partnership when I was Associate Vice Chancellor for External Relations. It is strange and interesting how things come together at some point.
And yes, I am proud to have occupied various administrative posts at DLSU. First, as PhD Computer Science Coordinator and then Graduate Director in 1993, then in the years that followed, not in chronological order, I was Vice Dean, Dean of the College of Computer Studies, Associate Vice Chancellor for External Relations, and Vice Chancellor for Research.
I have also risen thru the academic ranks of Associate Professor and Full Professor, and had been elected to the Society of University Fellows (SUF), serving as Head of the Society for two years during the pandemic.
At one point, while on research leave from DLSU, I was a Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore. On my return from NUS, on secondment from DLSU, I led DLS Canlubang as its first Executive Vice President since it opened in 2003 with less than 500 students from Kindergarten to College. I stayed there until mid-2008, and by then, the Integrated School had grown to 5 sections per year level, from kindergarten to high school.
Having seen the Canlubang campus struggle to survive but steadily grow in its first 5 years of operation, I took my appointment as Science and Technology Campus Pioneer Faculty Member very seriously. So much so that I have openly supported the next sets of officers of the campus, but at the same time also vehemently opposed various decisions and programmes that, to my mind, needed to be reconsidered.
My long-time and deep association with the Canlubang campus moved me to lead the writing of a White paper, along with several other senior members of the SUF, about the present and future of the DLSU Laguna Campus. Some of the recommendations in that White paper have been implemented. However, many other major recommendations, in particular those that concern the governance of the campus, and an empowered leadership, have yet to be fully and openly discussed for possible action.
Bothersome were some of the decisions that had to do with allowing the long-term free use of assets and facilities by outsiders; this, while the rest of the Laguna Campus community were and are begging for fully deserved academic spaces. I can only hope and pray that the loopholes in governance may soon be plugged. I do understand that certain major decisions take time to be deliberated on, with full consideration of their various consequences involving the different stakeholders of the University. But, in my opinion, the university should recognize the opportune time now to provide the Laguna campus the empowered leadership it needs. The lack of empowered leadership in the Laguna campus continues to stick out like a sore thumb.
As a final “crusade”, I have been actively promoting for the conversion of the campus into a Design and Innovation Hub, as a “Lasalle Tech”, with Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) as its teaching and learning approach. I have worked on it since 2019 and I am hopeful that the campus would steadily move towards this general direction in the years to come.
I am truly honored to have been an active member of the academic community from the very start, and to have been treated as a Lasallian lay partner at different levels; and to have shared the One mission with the Brothers.
I wrote a short reflection years ago about how De La University has two “faces”, and how it goes by two different “paces”. And yes, we are a “Barney university”, almost to a fault, where colleagues look after each other.
I would never exchange DLSU for any other place to spend a good thirty years of my professional career. Here, I have had the honor to work with colleagues who are among the best and brightest minds I have ever engaged with; among the most committed and hard-working; and among the most pleasant to work with. For all my strong language, decrying specific policies and recently-approved programmes, and often seemingly frustrated, if not furious, I have always found solace in my belief that the University has a compelling core Mission; and strong organizational values to inch its way in the general direction where the One Mission points it to.
I retired in September, 2023, at the age of 60.