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By Rene Q. Bas, Editor in
Chief
THE University of the Philippines
has a new charter that proclaims it a “national
university”—just as the world’s top-ranking universities are.
The new charter allows UP to be fiscally independent so that it can
increase the salaries of its professors, which are lower than those
paid by the Ateneo and La Salle.
Fiscal independence also allows
it to buy whatever equipment it needs to become a world-class
university with a better chance of rising to the level of being the
pre-eminent one in all Asia.
The new charter allows UP to
enter the world of commerce and industry—its professors,
researchers and scholars to cohabit more zestfully with businessmen
and industrialists. By so doing it can raise much more money than it
has now, which should be very much more than the continuing subsidy
that the government will and can afford to give it.
Even before President Arroyo
signed on April 29 the law creating the UP’s new charter, the
university administration had already gone into business in several
ways. It, for example, leased to the Ayala Group what used to be a
huge wasteland along Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City. That land
has become a paragon of good real-estate development, reminiscent of
how Silicon Valley became the womb of the world’s information
technology industry.
The new charter places the UP
more frankly in the commercial world. At the same time it mandates
the UP system to continue being a citadel of academic freedom and
intellectual rigor. This circumstance is happily coupled with the
presence as the UP president today, for the first time in its
history, of a person from the business-administration segment of
academe, Dr. Emerlinda Roman. She had been an outstanding business
administration professor and chancellor of UP Diliman before her
appointment as president of the entire UP system.
UP’s centennial celebration
began in January. This month, as UP President Emerlinda Roman tells
us (see her article “100 years of excellence, leadership and
service”) is a high point in UP’s year-long celebration.
National Artists, Scientists
On June 16, the university will
present the UP Centennial Awards to former UP presidents and to UP
alumni and faculty members who hold the distinction of being
National Artists or National Scientists. One of them, Frankie Sionil
Jose—the novelist, founder of Philippine PEN and worthy nominee
for the Nobel Prize for Literature—is the former managing editor
of the Sunday Times Magazine.
The Philippine legislature of the
American colonial period that wrote the UP charter in 1908 saw the
university as one of the people and for the people. It was after all
a fully government-subsidized institution, with the subsidy coming
from taxpayers—the people.
It was arguably the pre-eminent
English-language university in Asia for many years. But UP lost its
pre-eminence when the National University of Singapore advanced to
its present level in the late 80s.
With its new charter, which
UP’s young population of militants don’t like very much, UP can
advance and at least rise to the level of NUS and the Australian
national universities.
With Dr. Roman managing the UP,
working to make it prosper, the flight of professors to
better-paying jobs abroad will be stopped. Some of these are the
country’s—and among them the world‘s—best in their fields.
This brain drain, other than the lack of money for advanced
equipment and buildings and laboratories as pleasant and serviceable
as those in the First World, is what has crippled UP the most.
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