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By Elmer A. Ordoñez
AFTER 100 years of having a
colonial charter, the premier state university of the Philippines
has a new one assuring it of fiscal autonomy and academic freedom.
This should be a
boon to UP constituents particularly the faculty and staff whose low
salaries will no longer be tied to the salary standardization law
covering government officials and employees.
The UP joins other public
corporations like GSIS and Napocor whose boards of directors have
managed to give their officials and employees very generous salaries
and benefits.
But unlike these corporations the
UP is partly subsidized by the national government, with the new
charter allocating an additional P100 million to its annual subsidy
(some P700 million) for five years—still a pittance compared to
the support given national universities in some Asean countries.
But not to worry because the new
charter gives the UP administration flexibility in managing its
fiscal policies. Assisting the UP regents is an “independent trust
committee” (ITC) made up of private entities from the business
community.
Thus the UP should be able to pay
higher salaries to its professors like those given by De La Salle
and Ateneo (the usual examples for comparison) and at the same time
upgrade its teaching/research facilities. The goal is to achieve the
pre-eminence it once enjoyed in Asia.
These hopes hinge on UP’s
ability to generate income by commercializing its assets, not just
physical (like land, real estate, laboratories and equipment) but
also intellectual resources (from faculty and students). The UP
constituents will have to wait awhile to realize the boon expected
under the new charter.
But trust UP’s managers who
should be able to make the state university humming with commercial
activity with the help of the ITC from the business world.
Herein lie what the dissenting
faculty call “new threats to academic freedom.” Well before the
charter bill was signed, an associate professor, Ramon Guillermo,
noted that “some ill-conceived aspects” of the Senate Bill 1964
(consolidated with House Bill 2845 to become RA 9500) “shall
transform the UP 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.”
Guillermo said that despite
the trend in leading universities of the world towards greater
democratization, the new charter strengthens the power of the Board
of Regents (BOR) composed of ex-officio members, the Commission on
Higher Education chairman, the UP president, chairs of congressional
committees on education, the alumni president, elected members from
the faculty, staff, and students, and three members appointed by the
president.
Guillermo said then that UP
officials criticized proposals for democratization (e.g.
consultative assemblies, now included in the new charter) as
inefficient and expensive, and preferred to have the “independent
trust committee” with the task of “giving direction on
appropriate investment objectives and permissible investments” in
the university. He finds galling the inclusion in the charter of the
names of specific business entities of the ITC. Has this been done
before?
The nomenclature of the ITC are
presumed to be permanent fixtures in the business world—the
Bankers Association of the Philippines, Investment Houses
Association of the Philippines, Trust Officers Association of the
Philippines, and the Financial Executive Institute of the
Philippines—enshrined for the first time in a UP charter.
In effect, in the professor’s
view, there will be two governing bodies: a quasi-board of trustees
called the Independent Trust Committee and “an outwardly public
interest oriented BOR.” A potential conflict exists between the
two.
Guillermo cites the study of two
Australian educators (Stephen and Deborah Ball), “Hidden
Privatization in Public Education,” which noted two types of
privatization: endogenous (involving the “importing of ideas,
techniques and practices from the private sector to make the public
sector more like business and more businesslike”) 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 said that having on-
campus “academic core zones” (supposedly insulated from lease,
sale and other forms of business) “reduces commercialization to a
problem of lot assignment which only recognizes exogenous but not
the more harmful types of endogenous privatization.”
The authors of the new UP charter
may have the best intentions of improving the fiscal standing of the
university so that it can pursue its goal of excellence in higher
education. The outcome may also be something else.
As I noted earlier in my column
“The Other View”: “I don’t think it is just the low fiscal
priority given to state universities and public education [an
inevitable result of official corruption] that has driven UP
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 the UP itself and its new ideology of neo-liberalism.”
What the neo-liberal charter
ultimately does to the UP as a public service institution of higher
learning, of course, remains to be seen.
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