The six nominees to become the 22nd president of the university faced the UP constituency for the first time yesterday at Cine Adarna, UP Diliman (UPD), less than a month before the UP Board of Regents (BOR) selects UP’s next chief executive.

Catanduanes State University (CatSU) President Patrick Alain Azanza, former 1-Ang Edukasyon Rep. Salvador Belaro Jr., former UP Regent Angelo Jimenez, UPD Chancellor Fidel Nemenzo, engineering professor Benito Pacheco, and former UP Los Baños (UPLB) Chancellor Fernando Sanchez Jr. pitched their mission and vision for the national university should they be selected as the chief academic and executive officer of UP.

Here are four takeaways from the public forum:

The questions were lackluster.

The public forum should have been a platform for a wide array of UP constituents to ask questions concerning their sectors. However, we saw questions that lacked substance, often to the point of merely allowing the nominees to regurgitate what is already in their vision and mission statements.

For instance, repetitive and nearly identical questions were asked concerning faculty and staff benefits. And while those are legitimate concerns by UP employees, the limited time of the forum could have been used more efficiently had similar questions been lumped together to allow for more topics to be discussed by the nominees. Even the impending P2.5-billion UP budget cut was not asked at all.

The forum was also notable for asking extremely UP-centered questions. One must be reminded that national concerns affect the national university, in the same way that UP’s governance could impact the country, too. The president of UP is not just an academic leader; he is also a national leader responsible for steering the direction of the national university’s foremost mandate of public service. Disappointingly, only one national issue was tackled, the jeepney modernization program, which is, arguably, beyond the purview of the UP president.

This does not come as a surprise as the questions sent by the audience were screened by the UP administration, even warning that insulting or demeaning questions were prohibited (a capricious standard). And while it is ultimately the BOR that will select the president, the UP constituents—the very community the president vows to serve—deserve to hear the nominees answer the difficult yet relevant questions for them.

The nominees’ stances were nearly homogenous.

The UP president selection is a highly political exercise. The nominees seek to sway at least six of the 11 members of the BOR to clinch the presidency, and the public forum is one of their avenues to do so. As a result, the nominees must carefully craft their stances to be, at the very least, magnanimous and in line with the rest of the UP community and, especially, the board. Running for the job entails selling oneself to the secretive BOR.

Take for instance when asked about their stance on UP’s decline in the world university rankings. All the nominees told the audience (and the BOR) that the rankings must only serve as a guide—not a foolproof metric of the university’s performance. This, despite the UP administration’s constant boasting of world rankings.

The issue of commercialization of UP lands, too, received noncommittal responses from the six nominees. “There are so many ways of maximizing our assets and lands,” said Jimenez. “We need to study our assets well,” Nemenzo said. “We need to plan to secure all our land assets,” Sanchez said. “Linawin ang academic core zones,” Pacheco said. “It should be consistent with the land use plan,” Belaro said. While Azanza narrated what he did in CatSU, his answer still implied using UP lands for resource-generation.

The nominees’ winnability might very well depend on how they package their ideologies, beliefs, and world views, but they cannot be eternally lukewarm on pressing issues. Being the university president, after all, demands a firm position on issues—issues that matter most to UP and its constituents.

Digitalization and tech were the buzzwords.

The pandemic has changed UP education, and the institutionalization of some form of remote learning is the likeliest side effect of COVID-19. Even the outgoing UP administration’s academic roadmap has spelled, in broad terms, that remote learning is here to stay.

Azanza, who has proudly branded himself as a data scientist and one of the pioneers of remote learning, floated concepts like “multiversity” and “metaversity” (a virtual reality university)—concepts which he borrowed from other institutions like the University of California System in the US and the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. Nemenzo, with his vision of a “Smart UP,” and Jimenez’s plan of “digital transformation” also focused highly on the perceived need of UP to modernize its processes and infrastructure.

The last time a UP president tried to implement digitization on such a massive scale, he was met with massive protests and condemnation. Former UP President Alfredo Pascual’s controversial eUP project was marred with irregularities owing to the project’s exorbitant cost and procurement issues. In seeking to digitize virtually all information and campus processes, eUP would essentially privatize and sacrifice students’ rights to big tech. Until now, eUP’s main feature, the SAIS, has not been fully implemented across the UP System due to continued opposition. This March, UPLB decided to junk SAIS in favor of a homegrown system.

But while the nominees’ platform seemed visionary, all of them failed to address the issue that has hounded UP during the pandemic: the digital divide. Even UP admitted in 2020 that over 5,000 UP students cannot continue with remote learning. After all the nominees’ talk about tech and modernity, not one of them had plans to address the faculty and students’ need for better and adequate tech infrastructure for remote learning.

Nominees who are UP faculty stood out.

Anyone can be nominated as UP president—even though you are no longer affiliated with the university—so long as the candidate meets the BOR-set qualifications (which are lax, anyway). Three of the six nominees are no longer affiliated with UP: Azanza, Belaro, and Jimenez, who ended a four-year stint as a regent last year. Nemenzo, Pacheco, and Sanchez are currently UP faculty members.

The three UP professors demonstrated a deep understanding of issues that surrounded the university. When asked about the institutionalization of the UPD PsycServ, the four were able to lay their plans while Azanza and Belaro fumbled and resorted to motherhood utterances. “Make it more institutionalized. The way of the future is digitalization,” said Belaro, for instance. (In their defense, Belaro and Azanza chided UP’s tendency of “inbreeding,” or selecting officials from its pool of current administrators.)

Nemenzo, Pacheco, and Sanchez stood out when asked about issues concerning the university like research thrusts, contractualization, and the philosophy of UP education. Those nominees, especially the Diliman chancellor, even paraded their decades-long UP service. “Mahal ko ang UP. I have loved it through seasons of strife and seasons of grace,” Nemenzo proudly said in his opening pitch.

While it is not a strict requirement that a UP president should be affiliated with UP, past BORs have favored selecting a president who is currently connected with UP. For example, outgoing President Danilo Concepcion was the law dean before his selection, Pascual was a regent, and former President Emerlinda Roman used to be the UPD chancellor before being selected for the top job. History tells us that the board tends to avoid selecting “outsiders” to be the UP president.

For now, what matters most is to remain critical and vigilant of the nominees’ plans for the university. It is also imperative that we select a UP president who is not only a good administrator but also someone who lends high regard to his constituents and UP’s role in the nation.

As Concepcion said, “[Being the UP president] is a balancing act because UP is a large community and the UP president must maintain the balance between internal and external expectations. The UP president must understand that while we must learn from the past, we cannot be defined by it.” ●