Lobbying for Charter change
May 19, 2003 | 12:00am
I know I told you that I’d just been appointed spokesman, in effect, of the University of the Philippines System, so you all should have been forewarned, but let me assure you that you’re not going to read about UP half the time. It’s just that this period happens to be a crucial one for the university and its future, so kindly indulge me in this pitch I’m going to make for the old alma mater. Hopefully this will prove interesting and informative even for non-UP grads, because it will shed some light on some very basic issues in Philippine higher education today.
We’re going to be in the Senate next week to lobby for Charter change – no, I don’t mean that Constitution last overhauled in 1987, which everyone and his brother seems to want to tamper with, but the University of the Philippines Charter, first written in 1908 and only spottily revised since then. This should be of interest not only to UP’s 55,000 currently enrolled students, 4,500 faculty members, 9,500 other employees, and 203,000 living alumni, but to the nation at large as well, given UP’s academic leadership, and the fact that, for better or for worse (thankfully more of the former than the latter), its graduates occupy many, if not most of the top positions in government, business, the professions, the arts, and civil society.
Why change the Charter? Well, it badly needs updating, first of all, even for cosmetic purposes. It still opens with a reference to the American Governor-General, authorizing him to put up a university in "the City of Manila, or at the point he may deem most convenient..." It still conceives of UP as one self-contained campus, when in fact the UP System, as we more properly call it, now comprises seven constituent universities occupying 11 places or campuses all over the country (with one of them, the UP Open University, operating largely in cyberspace).
When UP was established almost a century ago, it was practically the only show in town as far as public tertiary education was concerned; today it is merely one of more than a hundred state universities and colleges or SUCs, all of them competing for a share of the same budgetary pie.
I really shouldn’t say "merely," because, to tell the truth, UP’s P4.3-billion annual budget accounts for a huge chunk, about 25 percent, of the SUC budget, which in turn is 13.5 percent of the entire education budget. This is why other SUCs have on occasion felt aggrieved by the priority given to UP, and there’s no doubt that if UP has it bad in certain respects, most SUCs have it far worse. (I know that P4.3 billion sounds like a lot, but when you consider all the work that UP does and is expected to do in its seven constituent universities – operating as a modernized, 21st-century institution – it can go only so far. The figure actually already represents a sizeable reduction from its previous budget; so instead of forging forward, UP is simply making do.)
But there’s an argument to be made for the need to support, as fully as possible, one truly national university – on the level of, say, the University of Tokyo, the National University of Singapore, Peking University (which you would’ve thought would be called Beijing University by now, but isn’t), Seoul National University, and the Australian National University. You need such a university – the best you can get for your money – to be on the cutting edge of higher education and set standards for everybody else, rather than keeping it in check and scrimping on its budget in some misplaced notion of democracy.
As UP President Dodong Nemenzo puts it, "A national university can be seen to be first among equals – indeed, in cases such as ours, it has no equal in terms of the comprehensiveness and caliber of its academic offerings, its geographical reach, its research capabilities, and its graduate programs. A national university should be comparable to the best in the region. Within the country, it serves as the wellspring from which other academic institutions draw intellectual sustenance and inspiration; it makes unique and vital contributions to national policy, development, and culture, and produces a corps of national leaders in all endeavors. A national university, in other words, is the living embodiment of our finest intellectual aspirations."
We’re almost there in many respects. Thanks to an aggressive modernization program and generous alumni support, we’ve been able to acquire such exotic-sounding but vital pieces of equipment as the P18-million Femtosecond Laser Laboratory for our National Institute of Physics and the Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer for UP Los Baños. Beyond upgrading its physical infrastructure, UP has also invested heavily in its prime resource – its collection of brains – through merit promotions, publication awards, study grants, and professorial chairs.
This doesn’t mean that everything is just peachy in Diliman and on our other campuses. While many UP units may have been certified as Centers of Excellence by the Commission on Higher Education, I wonder how long we can keep this up, given how quickly and predictably we’re losing many of our best and brightest minds to the competition. Nobody gets a prize for figuring that low pay remains the bane of teaching in UP. We have many teachers who can barely pay the rent and send their own kids to good schools, much less buy a house or even a second-hand car.
I’ve said this many times before in this corner, but UP – or any national university worth its name – can’t afford to lose too many more of its top professors to other universities and to the private sector here and abroad. We keep complaining about the decline in the quality of Philippine public education, but unless we put our money where our mouth is, the situation can only get worse.
What kind of figures am I talking about? A table comparing current faculty salaries in UP, Ateneo, and La Salle across ranks from instructor to full professor pretty much tells the story. Adjusted for a uniform teaching load of 24 units an academic year, entry-level base salaries aren’t too far off from one another: P12,546 a month for UP, P12,381 for Ateneo, and P18,364 for La Salle. As you climb up the ladder, the differences become more acute: a full professor gets a maximum of P30,113 in UP, P35,048 minimum in Ateneo (Ateneo has no salary ceilings), and P63,221 maximum in La Salle. In other words, at the end of the academic rainbow in UP, and after something like 25 years of teaching as a full professor with a PhD, you can expect a pot of gold amounting to little more than P30,000 a month. In La Salle, which goes by trimesters, that’s worth P94,360.
This is why, under the new Charter, we’re asking for the authority to fix our own pay scales, which will ultimately depend on the academic market (it’s not easy to think of ourselves as commodities, but reality has a rude way of reminding us that, sometimes, we are), what we can raise, and what we can get. Knowing that we can’t depend entirely on the national government to cough up the cash – although the least it can do is to restore our budget cuts and desist from any further pruning – we’re willing to consider alternative means of augmenting faculty and staff incomes.
UP isn’t without its own resources. Its creation endowed it with land grants – some 25,000 hectares of land all around the country (the whole Diliman campus covers about 500 hectares). But we need the fiscal autonomy and flexibility to use these resources, among others, to generate income that can augment whatever we’re getting from the national government. As it stands, we’re spending money and tying up our lawyers to protect idle land from land grabbers and squatters. (You should see the gall of people claiming to own pockets of UP’s Diliman property, plastering their names across a GI-sheet fence warning "trespassers" to stay out.)
The trouble is, anytime anyone speaks of "developing" UP land or entering into joint ventures with private industry, someone else’s knee jerks involuntarily, followed by a blood-curdling scream: "Commercialization!" I don’t know where these people get their definitions, but I’ve always thought that commercialized education meant selling degrees and diplomas, and churning out graduates in caps and gowns with hardly a new four-syllable word to show for their matriculation fees – something which, thankfully, UP hasn’t been desperate enough to get into.
"Commercialization" itself can’t be a bad idea – heck, we have a whole college devoted to it, offering doctorates in business administration – but while private enterprise might not and perhaps should never be a public university’s main source of funds, a top-notch university ought to have the option to raise some of its own money. We’re not even talking shopping malls here (although, for the record, you should see the swanky mall right smack in the middle of Stanford University, which seems none the worse academically or economically for the bother). If you think that Quezon City already has one mall too many, you needn’t worry; the present UP administration thinks so as well, and is pinning its hopes on more suitably academically-oriented ventures such as technoparks.
I hope we can finally realize and accept the fact that the 1970s have been over for quite some time now, and that a university like UP needs to keep ahead of, rather than lag behind, the times to serve the people the best way it can – by fulfilling its academic mission, with adequate support from the government and its own constituency.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
We’re going to be in the Senate next week to lobby for Charter change – no, I don’t mean that Constitution last overhauled in 1987, which everyone and his brother seems to want to tamper with, but the University of the Philippines Charter, first written in 1908 and only spottily revised since then. This should be of interest not only to UP’s 55,000 currently enrolled students, 4,500 faculty members, 9,500 other employees, and 203,000 living alumni, but to the nation at large as well, given UP’s academic leadership, and the fact that, for better or for worse (thankfully more of the former than the latter), its graduates occupy many, if not most of the top positions in government, business, the professions, the arts, and civil society.
Why change the Charter? Well, it badly needs updating, first of all, even for cosmetic purposes. It still opens with a reference to the American Governor-General, authorizing him to put up a university in "the City of Manila, or at the point he may deem most convenient..." It still conceives of UP as one self-contained campus, when in fact the UP System, as we more properly call it, now comprises seven constituent universities occupying 11 places or campuses all over the country (with one of them, the UP Open University, operating largely in cyberspace).
When UP was established almost a century ago, it was practically the only show in town as far as public tertiary education was concerned; today it is merely one of more than a hundred state universities and colleges or SUCs, all of them competing for a share of the same budgetary pie.
I really shouldn’t say "merely," because, to tell the truth, UP’s P4.3-billion annual budget accounts for a huge chunk, about 25 percent, of the SUC budget, which in turn is 13.5 percent of the entire education budget. This is why other SUCs have on occasion felt aggrieved by the priority given to UP, and there’s no doubt that if UP has it bad in certain respects, most SUCs have it far worse. (I know that P4.3 billion sounds like a lot, but when you consider all the work that UP does and is expected to do in its seven constituent universities – operating as a modernized, 21st-century institution – it can go only so far. The figure actually already represents a sizeable reduction from its previous budget; so instead of forging forward, UP is simply making do.)
But there’s an argument to be made for the need to support, as fully as possible, one truly national university – on the level of, say, the University of Tokyo, the National University of Singapore, Peking University (which you would’ve thought would be called Beijing University by now, but isn’t), Seoul National University, and the Australian National University. You need such a university – the best you can get for your money – to be on the cutting edge of higher education and set standards for everybody else, rather than keeping it in check and scrimping on its budget in some misplaced notion of democracy.
As UP President Dodong Nemenzo puts it, "A national university can be seen to be first among equals – indeed, in cases such as ours, it has no equal in terms of the comprehensiveness and caliber of its academic offerings, its geographical reach, its research capabilities, and its graduate programs. A national university should be comparable to the best in the region. Within the country, it serves as the wellspring from which other academic institutions draw intellectual sustenance and inspiration; it makes unique and vital contributions to national policy, development, and culture, and produces a corps of national leaders in all endeavors. A national university, in other words, is the living embodiment of our finest intellectual aspirations."
We’re almost there in many respects. Thanks to an aggressive modernization program and generous alumni support, we’ve been able to acquire such exotic-sounding but vital pieces of equipment as the P18-million Femtosecond Laser Laboratory for our National Institute of Physics and the Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer for UP Los Baños. Beyond upgrading its physical infrastructure, UP has also invested heavily in its prime resource – its collection of brains – through merit promotions, publication awards, study grants, and professorial chairs.
This doesn’t mean that everything is just peachy in Diliman and on our other campuses. While many UP units may have been certified as Centers of Excellence by the Commission on Higher Education, I wonder how long we can keep this up, given how quickly and predictably we’re losing many of our best and brightest minds to the competition. Nobody gets a prize for figuring that low pay remains the bane of teaching in UP. We have many teachers who can barely pay the rent and send their own kids to good schools, much less buy a house or even a second-hand car.
I’ve said this many times before in this corner, but UP – or any national university worth its name – can’t afford to lose too many more of its top professors to other universities and to the private sector here and abroad. We keep complaining about the decline in the quality of Philippine public education, but unless we put our money where our mouth is, the situation can only get worse.
What kind of figures am I talking about? A table comparing current faculty salaries in UP, Ateneo, and La Salle across ranks from instructor to full professor pretty much tells the story. Adjusted for a uniform teaching load of 24 units an academic year, entry-level base salaries aren’t too far off from one another: P12,546 a month for UP, P12,381 for Ateneo, and P18,364 for La Salle. As you climb up the ladder, the differences become more acute: a full professor gets a maximum of P30,113 in UP, P35,048 minimum in Ateneo (Ateneo has no salary ceilings), and P63,221 maximum in La Salle. In other words, at the end of the academic rainbow in UP, and after something like 25 years of teaching as a full professor with a PhD, you can expect a pot of gold amounting to little more than P30,000 a month. In La Salle, which goes by trimesters, that’s worth P94,360.
This is why, under the new Charter, we’re asking for the authority to fix our own pay scales, which will ultimately depend on the academic market (it’s not easy to think of ourselves as commodities, but reality has a rude way of reminding us that, sometimes, we are), what we can raise, and what we can get. Knowing that we can’t depend entirely on the national government to cough up the cash – although the least it can do is to restore our budget cuts and desist from any further pruning – we’re willing to consider alternative means of augmenting faculty and staff incomes.
UP isn’t without its own resources. Its creation endowed it with land grants – some 25,000 hectares of land all around the country (the whole Diliman campus covers about 500 hectares). But we need the fiscal autonomy and flexibility to use these resources, among others, to generate income that can augment whatever we’re getting from the national government. As it stands, we’re spending money and tying up our lawyers to protect idle land from land grabbers and squatters. (You should see the gall of people claiming to own pockets of UP’s Diliman property, plastering their names across a GI-sheet fence warning "trespassers" to stay out.)
The trouble is, anytime anyone speaks of "developing" UP land or entering into joint ventures with private industry, someone else’s knee jerks involuntarily, followed by a blood-curdling scream: "Commercialization!" I don’t know where these people get their definitions, but I’ve always thought that commercialized education meant selling degrees and diplomas, and churning out graduates in caps and gowns with hardly a new four-syllable word to show for their matriculation fees – something which, thankfully, UP hasn’t been desperate enough to get into.
"Commercialization" itself can’t be a bad idea – heck, we have a whole college devoted to it, offering doctorates in business administration – but while private enterprise might not and perhaps should never be a public university’s main source of funds, a top-notch university ought to have the option to raise some of its own money. We’re not even talking shopping malls here (although, for the record, you should see the swanky mall right smack in the middle of Stanford University, which seems none the worse academically or economically for the bother). If you think that Quezon City already has one mall too many, you needn’t worry; the present UP administration thinks so as well, and is pinning its hopes on more suitably academically-oriented ventures such as technoparks.
I hope we can finally realize and accept the fact that the 1970s have been over for quite some time now, and that a university like UP needs to keep ahead of, rather than lag behind, the times to serve the people the best way it can – by fulfilling its academic mission, with adequate support from the government and its own constituency.
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