Fourteen (14) higher education administrators in Southeast Asia convened for a three-day forum titled “Leadership Excellence for Academe Program in Southeast Asia (LEAP SEA)” held in SEARCA, Los Baños, Laguna on 20-22 May 2009.

The LEAP SEA participants listen to lectures on higher education administration.

The forum aimed to provide a venue for sharing significant new knowledge about leadership in and management of higher education, especially those in agriculture. LEAP SEA is an improvement of the Advanced Higher Education Administrator Development (AHEAD) Course, which was implemented by SEARCA from 1993 to 2003 and had 937 training alumni. Aptly named, AHEAD was undertaken so that Southeast Asian higher education administrators would not lag behind their counterpart institutions in other areas of the world.

Through its enhanced version, LEAP SEA, it is hoped that new experiences and knowledge will continuously be shared through systematically organized scholarly accounts published as a book of cases for general circulation.

Dr. Felix Librero, forum coordinator and professor at the UP Open University, said that there is a need to adopt appropriate approaches to knowledge sharing such as the use of e-platform. However, he emphasized that experience-based learning through the construction of case studies about unique problems and solutions that executives have experienced is equally important. For this, executives have to convene; otherwise, experiences will practically remain to themselves.

The LEAP SEA executive forum was divided into five discussion themes including: 1) Environment of Higher Education in Agriculture, 2) Contextualizing Higher Education in Agriculture in the New Millennium, 3) Strategic Management for Higher Education Institutions in Agriculture and Forestry, 4) Learning Organizations and Total Quality Management: Focus on Higher Education Institutions in Agriculture and Forestry, and 5) Enhancing and Sustaining Standards and Assessment in Higher Education in Agriculture and Forestry.

Resource persons came from three academic institutions and one intergovernmental body namely: Dr. Supachai Yavaprabhas, SEAMEO Regional Center for Higher Education and Development (RIHED) Director; Prof. Mario Antonio G. Lopez and Dr. Federico M. Macaranas, both of the Asian Institute of Management (AIM); Prof. Jose S. Navarro and Prof. Mariano J. Dinglasan, Jr. of the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P); and Dr. Lee S. Yudin, University of Guam and President of the Asian Association of Agriculture Colleges and Universities (AAACU).

According to Dr. Yavaprabhas, change and diversity sum up higher education administration in Southeast Asia. Thirty years ago, higher education was only for the elite and prioritized the male population. Over the years, the massification of higher education occurred resulting to an increase in the number of institutions offering higher education not only in SEA but everywhere. Along with the increasing number of institutions is a question on the quality of higher education offered.

He further explained, “Changes happen very rapidly. The academe has to adapt – this may mean curriculum change at least every five years or a fusion program/mix of everything may also prove useful.” He also said that in the years to come, the sets of skills needed by the society could change. Thus, apart from examining students’ learning, there is also a continuous need to retrain educators/faculty to keep academic programs relevant.

On the other hand, two thematic ideas surfaced during the workshop facilitated by Prof. Lopez. These are 1) people do not seem to want to take up agriculture, and 2) agriculture graduates do not end up with jobs related to their field (job mismatch). He challenged the participants: “How should higher education institutions reinvent agriculture? Where is the passion in agriculture? Agriculture has moved on over time but our image of it is still that of a man and a carabao.”

Conclusively, all experts agreed that education evolves and different ways of managing higher education arise over time. They enumerated some future directions that higher education institutions should look into including:

• Financial resource generation: Instead of relying on old sources of funds, strategists must generate new funds from the private sector alongside public sector funding.
• Faculty development, retooling or retraining: This is to ensure that what the faculty teach is still relevant and concurrently answers the society’s needs.
• Organizational restructuring: Many education models have been applied in different parts of the world; it is the administrators’ role to review what will work best under the contexts of SEAsian higher education institutions.
• Program Revision: Both content and delivery may need to be changed in order to be more effective.