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By Nora O. Gamolo Senior Desk
Editor
Five days before clas-ses start
Tuesday, the current crop of student leaders at the University of
the Philippines were planning their next moves with other members of
the National Union of Students of the Philippines.
They had just finished a meeting
where rousing speeches were delivered about the sharp increase of
school fees, soaring inflation, shameless official corruption and
the controversial agrarian reform program and other issues.
The inter-school students’
meeting was hosted by the Office of the Student Regent. This
indicates the wealth of resources UP-bred activists have full access
to and make use of in asserting their principles.
Ironically, just six weeks
before, President Gloria Arroyo had signed UP’s new Centennial
Charter, supplanting what the militants call “the Colonial Charter
drafted under the Americans.”
Former faculty regent Judy
Taguiwalo called the new charter the “neoliberal UP Charter,” in
an interview with the Philippine Collegian, UP’s student organ.
The new charter will take effect
next year. This academic year is rhymingly described as “the grace
period for information dissemination” by Collegian writer John
Alliage Tinio Morales.
Under its new charter, UP has
been declared as the “national university,” putting it in the
same league as the prestigious Australian National University and
the National University of Singapore.
Some provisions of UP’s
Centennial Charter could also be seen as political victories of,
concessions to, UP’s ever-militant students who are always engaged
in a tug of war with the country’s power that be.
For one, the composition of the
board of regents, the policy-making body that the militants always
love to controvert, will be changed. The new law requires the
addition of a staff regent, in addition to the student and the
faculty regents.
Non-academic personnel complain,
however, that the new charter again fails to recognize them as a key
pillar of the university and an integral part of the UP community.
Tackling tuition
Just the same, UP’s militants
have won an ideological plum. Government appointees will now be
reduced to only three in the 12-person board of regents. The Malacañang
appointees have always been seen as agents of an enemy power.
University militants make sure their presence on the board is
uncomfortable, something that the whole university community
approves of since it perennially situates itself on the opposite
side of the Palace on practically every issue under the sun.
The students can also now invoke
under the new charter their right to be consulted on all fees
collected from students for student publications. The new charter
also guarantees that every publication will have freedom of
expression and editorial and fiscal autonomy.
Today, UP militants are furious
about what they consider as the “institutionalization of
commercialization” of the university. This complaint arises not
only from the new charter’s business-mindedness. It also results
from the imposition, the second time during the 2008 to 2009
academic, of a 300-percent increase in tuition fees. The last time
UP raised tuition fees was 11 years ago.
UP students are not as privileged
with exemption from tuition increases, as some have alleged,
according to Terry Ridon, a third-year law student and student
regent for 2007 to 2008. He pointed out that this economic reason is
why UP students have been dropping out in large numbers.
This charge is echoed by Alvin
Peters, another UP student and a former chairman of the UP Student
Council. He is now national president of the National Union of
Students of the Philippines, a 650-strong federation of student
councils all over the country. His election as head of the national
union has affirmed a time-honored tradition of UP student leaders
being the chiefs of the country’s national student movements.
The UP administration, however,
has claimed in an open letter that even with tuition fee increases,
there are more discounts given to students in the five-tier payment
schedule, and some students in Bracket E (the lowest income bracket)
are so fully subsidized that they do not pay any fee at all.
The tuition fee hike is not the
only issue convulsing the UP community these days. It has gone
ballistic over what it perceives to be the calculated moves to lease
out UP’s substantial estates for non-academic purposes. In 2006,
UP signed a 25-year land lease agreement with Ayala Land Inc. for 98
hectares of land on the southern side of Commonwealth Avenue to be
developed into the Ayala Science and Technology Park.
Land battle
In its 1994 Land Use Plan, UP’s
Commonwealth property was designated as a business development and
research zone, and the deal is said to be worth around P4.236
billion to the university. As the UP administration had said of its
capacious lands, “proper administration of these lands can greatly
minimize the dependence of the university on Congress budget
appropriations.”
For 2008, UP has proposed a
P11.5-billion budget. Since it is its Centennial year, UP is being
given a P6 billion budget, P2 billion more than its usual P4 billion
support from the national government.
Students have charged, however,
that “UP is leasing its precious land for non-academic purposes.
We don’t see much research and development value in the call
centers that will locate in the park.” This is what Collegian
Editor Larissa Mae Suarez wrote. She said UP’s lands could be put
to better use for needed additional infrastructure.
Sterling output
For all the militancy and ferment
still brewing on the campuses of the nationwide UP system –
militancy that has produced outstanding activists and fugitive
leftist cadres and rebels – UP also produces great minds. It has
educated some of the country’s most popular political and social
leaders, economists, lawyers, medical doctors, creative artists and
entrepreneurs. Several \o “Presidents of the Philippines”
Philippine presidents have done coursework at the university, either
as undergraduates or as postgraduate students. Twelve chief justices
of the \o “Supreme Court of the Philippines” Supreme Court, 36
out of the 57 \o “National Artist of the Philippines” National
Artists, and 30 out of the 31 \o “National Scientist of the
Philippines” National Scientists have been UP students of one kind
of another.
The UP System is now composed of
seven constituent universities located in 12 campuses around the
country. It offers 246 undergraduate degree programs and 362
graduate degree programs, more than any other university in the
country. 
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