Too much power is vested on the UP Board of Regents (BOR) and it must be stopped. The authority granted to the regents is based on their supposed legal and political know-how. Most of them, however, are not even stakeholders of UP. Yet they dictate the major policies and thrusts of UP–all while not being affected by their own decisions and unscathed by whatever peril they have brought because of their largely secret discussions.
Any policy will not be representative of the university’s sectors if the board will not actively connect and listen to the UP community through proper and thorough consultations.
The BOR determines the thrust of the university, yet it is not committed to carrying out the virtues of UP. Because of the buffer and censorship that executive sessions entail, the board’s powers are carried out under a shroud of secrecy. Time and again, the BOR has proven its detachment from the calls of the UP community–and so, its powers must be curtailed.
By law, the board is mandated to select the UP president, the chancellors of constituent units, and the deans of colleges. While the BOR only knows the candidates at a surface level, the constituents have lived experiences with the nominees. Selecting the top officials of the university, therefore, is a duty that should be claimed by the constituents directly affected by their leadership. Because ultimately, it is not the BOR, but the UP community who will be affected by the actions of the university’s leaders.
As promised by the UP Charter, decisions in the university shall be guided by democratic governance and its principles of “collegiality, representation, accountability, transparency, and active participation of the University’s constituents.” True democracy is letting the UP community select the nominee who will work with and preside over them, rather than the powers-that-be who remain unaware of the plight of UP’s constituents.
The only resolution here, then, is to strengthen democratic governance through a ground-up approach.
Beginning with the selection of university leaders, we must limit the powers of the board in having a hand in selecting administrators.
The chancellors should select the UP president as they are the top administrative officials in all UP constituent universities. On the other hand, students and the different sectors of the UP community—maninindas, workers, professors, among others—should select the chancellors, as the ones directly presided over by chancellors. Meanwhile, faculty and tenures should be decided on by the home college of which the concerned person is from. By doing so, the UP community can pick the candidate that will champion and privilege them.
Not only in appointments should the UP community’s voice bear weight in, but also in academic matters.
A recent contentious exercise of the board’s power was when it conferred an honorary doctor of law degree to Sen. Mark Villar in January. The decision was met with the disdain of many because of his family’s notoriety for land-grabbing and issues of development aggression. Despite such a reputation, the board finalized the decision without reflecting it in the minutes of the meeting.
Following this, honorary degrees should instead be under the discretion and recognition of respective colleges or institutions. After all, a degree is being awarded, akin to a student’s four-year degree program–which requires the scrutiny of the faculty. The BOR is not a qualified arbiter of such distinctions.
The approval of the graduation of students and awards are also unnecessarily granted to the board. Not only does this delay and prolong graduation due to bureaucratic processes, but it is simply superfluous as there are already established offices that can do so more efficiently and objectively.
The issue here lies in the lack of checks and balances when such a task is given to the BOR. The board simply serves as a rubber stamp in the process–a needless chore, as names of graduating students have already been validated by different UP offices that no such formality from the BOR is needed. Moreso, the board only meets once a month which slows down its function, especially since the regents take on heaps of workload. Regents are, after all, only part-time administrators.
When the board was established, the public character of UP was kept in mind, thus a number of the BOR members are government officials. Ideally, this is good if BOR is functioning with a clear goal in mind: to define the thrust and preserve the integrity of UP.
But acquiring control and power, it seems, is what the board is after. It can simply "delegate any of its powers to the President of the University or other officials or officers as it may deem necessary"–such as conferring honorary degrees and selecting the university’s administrators–yet that remains to be seen.
In the long run, what we need is a democratic UP where most decisions come from the ground up. What we need not are bureaucratic extravagance and frivolous potency from those who exercise their power unjustly. ●
Read the entire series here.
