It is often said that the pandemic has exposed how leaders and administrators are awfully unprepared in handling extraordinary situations. In the case of UP, Quezon Hall administrators had to learn how to manage a university that completely went into remote setup nearly overnight.

In Diliman, it was worse. A newly minted administration just took office a week before schools shut down. Chancellor Fidel Nemenzo did not even have his hand-picked administrators in place yet when the pandemic hit.

Admittedly, there is no single pandemic handbook. UP administrators, largely through the individual action of each chancellor, reviewed pandemic policies as the situation evolved. When classes resumed, we campaigned for academic easing. When typhoons hit in late 2020, we called for compassion–yet Nemenzo only issued a “case-to-case basis” class suspension guidelines. And now, more than halfway into the semester, some academic policies remain under review, including the no-fail policy. In those instances, the UP administration approached each issue “iteratively”—modifying the policies as the semester progressed.

As a consequence, the UP community often anxiously waited on what the 11-member UP Board of Regents (BOR), the President’s Advisory Council (PAC), or whoever is in charge of Quezon Hall, would decree. It was a top-down approach, with little to no input from the sectors that the policy would hit. Often, the managerial mode of governing UP has only led to passing on the burden to individual faculty members to execute badly thought and half-baked policies.

Since 2021, the UP System decreed a reading break, a week-long period in a term when deadlines and all forms of classes are suspended. Yet, until now, UP is rife with complaints of faculty members who are still scheduling class interactions during the said period because, for some, a 14-week semester is insufficient to cover all essential competencies in a course.

In the case of Diliman, Nemenzo has already approved the guidelines for face-to-face classes. But, how many students, if any, are even attending such classes? Academic units and faculty members themselves are so wary of the guidelines that they would rather continue dealing with the remote setup than apply and comply with the burdensome face-to-face guidelines.

We could go on listing the policies that the UP administration decreed but has not worked out as planned: forcing instructors to redesign their course and create a course pack (after a few months’ notice), the limiting of class size to 25 (teacher’s prerogative remain rampant due to lack of classes), and shortening the semester (which has only forced students to do requirements at a shorter time period) among others. The administrators spelled out these policies without much realizing their effect on the academic community and the quality of instruction.

In essence, there is a mismatch between what the administrators are envisioning and what is happening on the ground. And all these points to a single cause: Quezon Hall is out of touch.

Bodies like the BOR and PAC are not designed to debate and create policies. Even the UP Charter only gives the board the power to define in “general terms” UP’s objectives and craft “broad policy guidelines.” Nowhere in the charter says that the BOR should decree specific rules, more so, the PAC is not even mentioned in the charter. The power to enact academic policies is given to each constituent university’s University Councils (UC)—a body composed of the chancellor and faculty members with a rank of an assistant professor or higher.

Maybe, if the faculty themselves wrote the rules, they might have followed them more religiously.

This is not advocating for a faculty-centric governance. The rationale is simple: Faculty members are the most immersed in UP’s research and teaching thrusts. They are the most qualified in crafting academic policies since they have firsthand experience of their students’ situations and their long-term implications—an expertise particularly useful during remote learning. We cannot expect administrators—who take on a reduced teaching load—to fully grasp what is happening on the ground, except for the distilled data they receive from their own surveys.

And it is not just on academic matters. As we have seen over the past two years, the UC has released statements on pressing issues: opposing the Public Services Act, condemning the abrogation of the UP-DND Accord, blasting the Commission on Higher Education’s supportive stance on the removal of supposed subversive books, and a resolution for the BOR on the inviolability of academic freedom.

We do not seek to remove the administration from the decision-making process. The BOR must limit itself to broad statements of policy and let the academic community–faculty and students alike–decide its implementation. Similarly, we cannot expect the UC to act on menial requests like a class suspension–such matters remain within the authority of our administrators.

But while not perfectly reliable, the BOR remains a forum to air our grievances and review the troublesome policies of each UP unit through our sectoral regents. Still, by letting the faculty, through its formal bodies, engage more in policymaking, we can expect rules that are more attuned to the urgent and long-term needs of the university.

One may argue that faculty councils and multisectoral consultations are bureaucratic and too lengthy of a process to arrive at an urgent decision. To some extent, this is true, especially for contentious measures like the 2017 general education reform and the 2012 code of student conduct.

But debates among academics are themselves educational—proponents and opponents of a policy must make intellectual assertions for their stances, often reaching the lofty ideas in philosophy and the sciences, as the author Benjamin Ginsberg wrote in his book, “The Fall of the Faculty.” And once a vote in the UC is taken, the faculty can at least accept the defeat of their side, unlike BOR-imposed rules which are often decided with little to no debate, and votes are almost always taken in secret. Councils are deliberative while Quezon Hall is undemocratic.

If anything, the management of UP during the pandemic has only shattered the immaculate role administrators play in our academic life.

It is squarely within the role of the faculty to decide on issues affecting academics. Administrators must admit that they are indisposed to keep on calling the shots. Similarly, the faculty must always stand ready to defend their role in the governance of the university.

As the university prepares to reopen the campus and revisit its “academic roadmap,” it is imperative that we prevent the administrators from drowning the conversation. The All UP Academic Employees Union, in a statement, already condemned the UP administration’s attempt to force-feed possible curricular changes announced in a faculty summit last March.

Quezon Hall can try listening more. It would not diminish their role as leaders if they become open to a more democratic and consultative approach to governing, especially during uncertain times. After all, the involvement of all sectors is a tenet of shared governance and a subset of our much-cherished academic freedom. ●