Early Sol Gadong, the candidate nominated by the university’s academic union, was proclaimed as the faculty regent for 2025 to 2026 on Thursday, after garnering 62.62 percent of votes from all faculty systemwide.
Gadong served as the president of the All UP Academic Employees Union-Iloilo Chapter from 2017 to 2022 and is currently teaching at the UP High School in Iloilo and UP Visayas. She will officially start her term on January 1, 2025.
Rommel Rodriguez, the vice president for faculty of the union’s national chapter, said that it is important that the faculty regent comes from the rank-and-file or the ordinary employees who are usually not in an administrative position to offer genuine solutions to the faculty’s problems.
“Alam natin ang composition ng BOR (Board of Regents), diba? Tatlo lamang ang sectoral regents natin diyan. The rest ay kung saan-saan galing na konteksto at iba na ang perspective. Kaya mahalaga na may malawak na concern at lubog sa karanasan ng karaniwang guro o rank-and-file ang susunod na faculty regent,” Rodriguez said in an interview with the Collegian.
Issues that the new regent will have to face include infrastructure conditions and salary benefits for faculty, the continued refusal of the UP administration to institutionalize an academic freedom panel, and the recent signing of the UP-AFP Declaration of Cooperation.
The new faculty regent aims to expand the university’s hospitalization program by including counseling and purchase of maintenance medicines. The current policy only covers the cost of medication incurred during confinement for a maximum of P100,000 per year.
The inclusion of maintenance medicine has already been proposed by different organizations since 2019, but the BOR did not include this in their approved recommendations for the enhancement of the hospitalization program in 2023.
The new faculty regent also intends to establish policies for inclusivity by proposing that the bereavement leave include LGBTQIA+ partnerships. For research advancement, she intends to push for the institutionalization of a writing leave that gives time for faculty members to conduct research projects.
But despite expansive plans for her term, Gadong will face the challenge of gaining the majority approval of the BOR, a perennial problem for sectoral regents.
Gadong also aims to amplify the calls for the systemwide establishment of the Committee on the Promotion and Protection of Academic Freedom and Human Rights by strengthening national and international collaboration with organizations for the protection of human rights and academic freedom.
The panel was a proposal made by the outgoing Faculty Regent Carl Marc Ramota during the start of his term. But despite several UP campuses establishing their own panels, the proposal has yet to be institutionalized systemwide because of UP President Angelo Jimenez’s belief that the university’s academic freedom is not weak enough to warrant the need for such a committee.
“By itself, the Office of the Faculty Regent is hardly a sufficient mechanism to ensure that all the issues and concerns of the faculty sector will be addressed … However, with the support of the faculty sector, I firmly believe that the [office] plays a crucial role in addressing our needs for democratic governance in the university,” Gadong wrote in her plan of action. ●
