Finally the tsismis that the University of the Philippines (UP) won’t be able to immediately attend to one important provision of the 2008 UP Charter (the one on the provision on raising salaries) is now made official. . For those profs and staff who are “nagpapakabayani sa UP” this hardly is a surprise.
UP President Emerlinda Roman has requested Congress to include UP in the next re-adjustment of the Salary Standardization Law. Since the charter removes UP from the SSL, then UP faculty and staff may end up having lower salaries than counterparts from the most “bulok” state university and college. Horrors, hardworking UP staff will end up with lower salaries than government employees on Elliptical road!
The problem is that while some UP campuses can conceivably upgrade staff and faculty salaries, some cannot and must be subsidized by the larger campuses. Obviously Diliman can sustain pay increases given its assets. Manila has enough assets and so does UP Los Banos. But UP Visayas will need to find a way to utilize its Miag-ao campus for cash and UP Mindanao has to generate enough resources to at least develop the campus for its academic purpose.
The conventional wisdom is that it would be politically incorrect if Diliman, UPLB and Manila get a pay increase and UPV, Baguio and Mindanao don’t get any. The profs in these campuses may end up as UP’s version of “economic migrants” The wags in Diliman say that their campus may end up with “immigration problems”.
(Now that isn’t funny at all! :-) Diliman has always considered itself as an independent Republic from UPLB or the other campuses!)
Emer Roman has to find ways to resolve this thorny problem. While Congress can conceivably agree this time, it is unlikely that succeeding Congresses (or Parliaments :-) ) will agree next time.
Perhaps UP should look into downsizing to make it more resource efficient. Many review committees have recommended that some colleges be fused into faculties (like in the UK system) or abolish duplicate and redundant programs. Obviously this won’t go well in the campuses. There are a lot of people who have star complexes in each department or college. Fusing colleges into faculties will result that some of these “stars” will have to lose their shine.
And we haven’t even tackled the problem of underperforming and no show for class profs!
The centennial effort of raising cash however has paid off. There is now money to do initial repairs and maintenance of UP’s dilapidated buildings. We have to thank the alumni and friends of UP who spearheaded the fund raising effort.
On other matters, the UP Press has just released “Selected Essays on Science and Technology for Securing a Better Philippines”
The book is a collection of essays by our scientists on the state and future of science in the Philippines.
It sells for 850 pesos at the UP Press bookshop and at leading bookstores in the Philippines.
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The word tuition did not appear in your blogpost, nor the word reduction(/i>
You did have pay increase;
missing were :
tuition increase and
salary decrease.
I recall how as a graduate assistant, I get paid for P4 per hour not to exceed 4 hours a day, can you imagine that?
I hate that librarian at the UP CMC who asks me to do a lot of work, uncharacteristic of UP.
i don’t get Prof Roman’s complaint…
i’m sure they knew this (not being able to pay) would be a possibility right?
having your own salary scheme works both ways (higher or lower salaries).
the point of having the freedom to increase salaries is to reward units that are productive. how can we say we are incentivizing the units if we are merely protecting them from downward movements in income?
It seems that UP hasn’t fully realized the opportunities provided by the charter in that field.
UP should be closed down..their graduates are not helping the country anyway…in fact, their graduates who went to politics EVEN ROBBED THE COUNTRY!!!