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While academic freedom is guaranteed to state
universities in the Constitution, the University of the Philippines
faces new threats to its institutional autonomy and the freedom of
its scholars to conduct research and disseminate their findings.
Where before professors were
haled to appear in congressional investigations (like zoologist
Agustin Rodolfo and philosopher Ricardo Pascual in late the 50s) for
anti-Filipino (read communist) activities, or in court (like
literary scholar Leopoldo Yabes and historian/dean Tomas Fonacier in
the early 60s) for publishing supposedly a “seditious” article
in an academic journal (the Philippine Social Science and Humanities
Review), the new threats come from unlikely sources—in the form of
a Senate bill already approved and ratified. Its parallel bill
in the House still has to be ratified. Both bills are endorsed
by the U.P. administration.
Philippine studies professor
Ramon Guillermo mentioned these threats to academic freedom in a
statement on Senate Bill 1964. (Cf. my column piece, “From
Colonial to Neoliberal UP Charter,” Feb.9). Guillermo noted
that some ill-conceived aspects of the Senate bill “shall
transform the U.P. from a chronically underfunded university to a
privatized and commercialized one, from one that promises service to
the people to one that embraces competition and pledges that the
customer is always right.”
His observation draws from at
least two articles, one on collegial decision making through elected
academic bodies in universities in the U.S. and Europe (Gabriel
Kaplan, “Preliminary Results from the 2001 Survey on Higher
Education Governance,” American Association of University
Professors, 2001), and the other, Stephen Ball and Deborah Ball’s
“Hidden Privatization In Public Education,” Education
International 2007.
Guillermo wrote that despite the
tendency in many leading universities in the world towards greater
democratization, the Senate bill strengthens the present power of
the Board of Regents (BOR) composed of ex-officio (like the
beleaguered CHED chair) and members appointed by the president. He
sees UP officials themselves criticizing the proposals for
democratization as inefficient and expensive. They would
rather have an “independent trust committee” made up of private
entities from the business world with the task of giving
“direction on appropriate investment objectives and permissible
investments” in the university.
What is galling is the inclusion
of the specific names of these private entities in the proposed UP
charter. “This is akin,” Guillermo said, “to including a
provision to the effect that ‘McDonald’s shall henceforth
provide all necessary snacks for board of regents meetings in the
form of Happy Meals.’”
In effect there will be two
governing bodies in U.P.: a quasi-board of trustees called the
Independent Trust Committee, and an “outwardly public
interest-oriented BOR.” A potential conflict exists between the
two.
Ball and Youdell classify
privatization into two types: endogenous (involving the
“importing of ideas, techniques and practices from the private
sector in order to make the public sector more like business and
more business-like”) and exogenous (involving the “opening up of
public education services to private sector participation on a
for-profit basis and using the private sector to design, manage or
deliver aspects of public education”).
Guillermo notes that the idea of
having “academic core zones” (supposedly insulated from lease,
sale and other forms of business) enshrined in the charter to reduce
commercialization to a problem of lot assignments only recognizes
exogenous but not the more harmful types of endogenous
commercialization.
It is with a sense of déjà vu
that I read Guillermo’s comments and his references on
privatization of U.P. Back in 1995, when the issue of
commercialization in U.P. was first raised, I gave a talk on
“Commodification of University Values” in U.P. Manila and may
well draw from all this for the “alternative lectures” on the
centenary early next month in Diliman.
I don’t think that it is just
the low fiscal priority given to state universities and public
education (an inevitable result of official corruption) that has
driven U.P. officials to make a pact with big business for the
financial well-being of the institution, but it may be rooted in the
colonial history of U.P. itself and its new ideology of
neo-liberalism.
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