The National University of the Philippines

Last Tuesday, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo signed the new UP Charter into law in Cebu City. The new Charter recognizes UP as a national university, and grants it an additional P100 million to its regular budget each year for the next five years. To me, the biggest significance of the charter is that it gives UP the flexibility to provide a more competitive compensation package for its faculty and staff.

In 1981, upon becoming UP's 14th President, I experienced early on how rigid and inflexible government budget and accounting rules were stifling UP's academic development and institutional autonomy. No new programs could be introduced without the imprimatur of the national budget office. No physical structure could be built without prior audit of the COA. Worse, university income from tuition and all other sources had to be turned over to the national treasury. It was a sure prescription for retrogression and decline.

I sat down with then Budget Minister Manuel Alba and COA Chairman Francisco Tantuico and argued that the university in effect was being ran not by university officials but by outside government bureaucrats. The autonomy UP had enjoyed over the years that had made it truly outstanding was gone. They both understood and were sympathetic.

The happy upshot was a presidential decree giving UP fiscal autonomy, enabling the university to more than double its income, pay a 35% salary increase and introduce a 13th month pay, the first in the Philippines.

Recently, UP's College of Business Administration has lost six faculty members, and the College of Engineering 18 PhDs. Still more are being pirated by private universities here and abroad that are able to pay at least three times of what a UP professor receives.

The UP Charter comes at a momentous time on its Centennial year. It gives back to the university the freedom to provide its faculty a more generous salary and incentives scheme, through the exemption from the Salary Standardization Law.

This will help the University keep its excellent teaching staff, who have molded generation after generation of the country's leaders in law and justice, politics and civil society, health sciences and life sciences, engineering, culture and arts, and letters and literature.

Indeed, UP's first 100 years had helped shaped the nation. On its second century, the University must continue to bolster its position as the country's leading research university, firming up its science and technology programs, as well as strengthening its arts and humanities, making it comparable to the world's best institutions of higher learning.

With about five million Filipinos in tertiary education, the competition among universities is now stronger than ever. Academic programs and research have become fully global. To keep its place, UP must be able to compete in a highly globalized, dynamic world where trained manpower and knowledge-intensive services are in great demand.