Congress just slashed our UP budget. Our latest information is that 155 million pesos were removed from our maintenance and other operating expenses (MOOE), or a decrease of 18.36 percent over last year's. This year's cut in the national budget is the largest ever and UP alone among the 108 SUCs was chosen to contribute to this cut.
The Chair of the Senate Finance Committee says the reduction of the UP budget "is not a large cut", since UP "is no longer a people's university. It has become the university of the elite." Consider the P155 million reduction in our MOOE in terms of the total budget of our smaller campuses -- about P60 million each. Think, too, of our measures for strengthening present academic programs and raising the standards of instruction and research, which require considerable support. Consider, most of all, that we are preparing ourselves for the demands of our rapidly changing future, trying to keep our best academics in UP and upgrading our facilities.
Yes, we need more money, not less. But for the purpose of producing the best trained graduates, whatever their field, and contributing to the body of knowledge in keeping with the mandate of genuine scholarship. This mission is grossly ignored by allegations that we are a university of the rich. True, our wealthiest students pay only about one-fourth of La Salle and Ateneo tuition rates. But our multimillionaire student community (income brackets of one million and above) only amounts to 3.1 percent of the total student population. Even if we were to send these few students to private universities as the senator from my hometown suggests -- which we have no intention of doing -- we would still have the remaining 97 percent to serve.
The Senate Finance Committee chair says, "This great institution, which spends P4 billion a year, is educating the young people of Metro Manila." In fact, of last year's students who qualified for admission, only 26.5 percent or a little more than a fourth came from the National Capital Region. UP does not exclude students by virtue of their social class, faith or regional origin. We take in the best among them, giving some consideration to students from cultural communities and under-represented provinces.
Yet we have been wrongly accused of bias in favor of wealthy urbanites. Worse, the entire University is now being condemned to suffer from this patently false conception of UP and the utter inability to grasp the essence of the University's being.
Conveniently ignoring the fact that among all the SUCs, we are the only one in the country that ranks at all in Asia, we were called on the floor of the Senate, "the spoiled brat of our public universities", and again, "the spoiled child of the educational system, that has been getting every lollipop that it has wanted in the past."
We do not crave for lollipops. We aspire for academic excellence.
We refuse to shirk away from our responsibility as an institution of higher learning. We shall not be cowed by their threat that next year and until their term is up, we will go through the budget process before the very same mighty beings. Rather, our faculty, staff, students and alumni will remember these lawmakers and remember them well.
We will not only survive the cut imposed on our budget. We shall excel despite it. The quality, not quantity, of present academic programs will be our foremost concern. Strengthen them we will, as we continue to reward the best performing scholars among us, support the further development of our faculty, and modernize our libraries and communication system.
Our elders, unfazed by the post-war devastation, withstood the challenge
of reconstruction on the sheer strength of the faculty. We are just as
determined today to fulfill our mission. Let no one doubt our commitment
and sense of purpose.
2F Quezon Hall
University of the Philippines
Diliman, Quezon City 1101
Philippines
Tel. (632) 928-0110 / (632) 928-3014
Telefax: 920-6882
E-mail: pfn@surfshop.net.ph
op@up.edu.ph
