‘Trapo’-like spins on UP tuition hikes by Solita Collas-Monsod

(Published on Page A12 of the November 25, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer)

IT IS neither accurate nor fair to associate all students of the University of the Philippines (UP) with the so-called boycott of classes that was supposed to have taken place this past Thursday in protest of proposed tuition and other fee increases. What is accurate to say is that there was no boycott, or the boycott attempt failed. Why can one say this? According to information from all the colleges on campus, the classes proceeded as usual -- none were cancelled for lack of attendance. And this was buttressed by my own personal experience -- I teach two lecture classes on Thursdays, held in an auditorium because of the large class-size, and both were well attended. Definitely, there was no diminution of attendance that would spell “boycott.”

What is accurate to say is that what occurred was a rally/demonstration, attended by anywhere from 200 to 400 people (whether they were all from the UP community, one could not be certain; neither was it certain whether the students at the rally were all UP students), per eyeball estimate. One cannot really tell from the pictures because they were all “tight” shots -- almost close-up, giving the viewer no idea of the magnitude of the crowd. Which is in itself a dead giveaway, because if the crowd was large, the pictures taken would have been panoramic.

Moreover, as anyone familiar with the Diliman campus knows, these rallies/demonstrations are commonplace, and are generally organized by the same groups. Nevertheless, in the spirit of academic freedom and freedom of speech, they are allowed, defended, and even encouraged by the UP authorities. In effect, a rally of that size is no big deal.

A logical question would be: Why were there relatively few participants (considering that there are more than 25,000 students on campus, not to mention about the 1,500 faculty and 2,200 other staff)? One reason for this could be that, in the main, the students were indifferent -- probably because they will not be affected by any tuition fee increase, since this will only be imposed on incoming freshmen. The principle underlying this is that there is an implicit contract with students who had entered under a particular tuition fee structure that the structure would remain unchanged until they finished their studies. Doing otherwise would be like perpetrating a hold-up on their families, who would have very little choice other than to pay, because it is difficult to change schools.

But another reason -- which is not considered by many because of the perception that everyone in UP is a leftist/radical -- is that the students, studied, with no preconceived notions, the De Dios Committee recommendations (the report was released over four months ago) and found them reasonable. They refused to be carried away by the slogans and buzzwords that they were being inundated with.

A stretch? I don’t think so. In my years on the faculty, I have found that UP students, for the most part, have more important priorities than to wave banners, throw eggs, or scream epithets. But the latter is the kind of behavior that gets the publicity, and gives rise to the perception (including, that of Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez, who should know better), that UP is a waste of public money.

Everyone has a right to his own opinion, of course. I do not quarrel with that. What I find disturbing, however, is a certain similarity between some campus leaders and their national counterparts: the tendency to take liberties with the truth. Putting their own spin, as it were the facts, until they are unrecognizable. The youth hate the “trapo” [traditional politicians] for doing it, but they seem to have no problems doing it themselves, if it helps their cause.

Take for example (if newspaper accounts are accurate) one UP student leader quoted as saying: “Can you imagine? From P6,000, you’ll suddenly have to shell out P18,000 a semester?” This young man must have known (unless he didn’t do his homework, in which case he is even more like his adult political counterparts), that only (incoming) freshmen whose annual family income is more than P500,000 a year -- i.e., those belonging to the top 5 percent of families in terms of income -- will have to pay that amount. Since it would be silly to waste his sympathy on them, or on those who will have to pay P30,000 a semester because their family annual income is over P1 million, he makes it appear as if all students have to pay that much.

Not content with that, he then expresses his concern that more and more indigent students would not be able to get into UP for the simple reason that they could not afford it. Excuse me? Again, he completely ignores (or just as bad, is ignorant of) the Student Tuition and Financial Assistance Program of UP. Under this, the poorest students are not only exempted from paying the tuition and other fees, they are also given stipends of P12,000 every semester. As I mentioned in last week’s column, even the not-so poor (with incomes of P70,001 to P135,000 a year) will not experience a tuition fee increase at all, because they will be given a 70 percent discount from the new fees. In other words, UP is definitely taking care of its poor but (intellectually) deserving students -- it has been doing so since 1989.

Intellectual dishonesty or incompetence has contributed to the nightmare that is Philippine governance. That it has started in one so young, an “iskolar ng bayan” [people’s scholar], and a possible future leader of the country, is a shame.

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UP professors earn less than PMA cadets, says regent by DJ Yap

(Published on Page A20 of the December 29, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer)

CADETS at the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) may not know it, but they are actually earning more than some teachers at what is considered the country’s premier educational institution, the University of the Philippines system.

While a PMA cadet gets P16,338 every month, including subsistence allowance, an assistant professor I at the state-run university, with salary grade 18, has a monthly salary of P15,841.

“At standardized salary rates, the UP faculty is resigned to a life of genteel poverty,” Roland Simbulan, faculty regent, said at the recent UP System-wide Academic Personnel Conference in the Diliman, Quezon City campus. “If a faculty member is an instructor or assistant professor, it means that he/she gets less than what a student earns in a call center,” he added.

The UP has a faculty of 3,600 educators in all its campuses.
Simbulan said that while faculty members were proud to be teaching some of the brightest students in the country, even the prestige of teaching at the premier university was being eroded by the more pressing need to survive.

“Because of their meager salaries, most UP teachers can only afford to live in rented apartments on or outside their campuses,” Simbulan said. And those who stayed on campus “dreaded” the day of their retirement, knowing they would be evicted from their subsidized housing facilities, he added.

“Professors who are too old to shift careers are forced to peddle insurance plans and real estate, chorizo, and even cemetery plots to augment their income,” Simbulan said in his report.

The meager compensation based on the Salary Standardization Law was a “pittance compared to what is given to professors in leading private universities,” he said.

According to the 2006 report of the UP Ad Hoc committee to review tuition and other fees, a full professor at UP is paid P13,686 per teaching load unit—well below the P27,971 at De La Salle University and P18,600 at Ateneo de Manila University.

A UP associate professor receives P11,019, while his/her counterparts at La Salle and Ateneo receive P18,312 and P15,400, respectively. For UP assistant professors, the basic rate is P9,033. At La Salle and Ateneo the rates are P13,645 and P11,000, respectively. UP instructors get P7,098, while those in La Salle and Ateneo receive P9,454 and P7,600, respectively.

UP and the case for state subsidy by Randy David

(Published on page A13 of the November 26, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer)

LESS than two years from now, the University of the Philippines will mark its centennial. It will do so in a world far more complex than the colonial era that saw its founding. Additional campuses and new curricular offerings mirror the basic changes in function that UP has assumed as a state university. Over the years, it has had to negotiate the terms of its relationship with the State that supports its existence, constantly weighing the pressure of societal demands against its own self-understanding of what it means to be a university.

The Philippine Normal School was actually established a few years ahead of UP. The priority placed on the training of teachers for the public school system was in keeping with the American colonial government’s plan to democratize access to modern education. UP was meant to serve as the receptacle for the best and the brightest graduates of the public schools, who would then be trained and prepared for the various positions in the government service. UP was clearly at the center of the nation-building project from the start. The country needed a cadre not only of teachers but also of scientists, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, accountants, engineers and, of course, lawyers. It was UP’s role, as a state university, to produce a new generation of modern leaders and public servants.

The top graduates of public high schools were automatically admitted into the university and were granted exemption from paying tuition. Tuition at UP, in any case, was minimal until the ’70s. Still, not many Filipinos felt they needed a college education.

When I entered UP Diliman in the early ’60s, there were no more than 4,000 students on campus. They came from all over the country, representing the brightest young people of every province. They thought of themselves as the nation’s future leaders by virtue of their simply being there. Much was expected of them. In turn, they were imbued with a deep sense of duty to country and people. They did not think that their country owed them anything; on the contrary, they felt they owed the country everything, and that nothing would please them more than to be able to serve it. One might call it the nobility of public service. UP was elitist only in this sense—that its students thought of the nation’s future as their responsibility.

Basic education—grade school and high school—was something that every Filipino valued highly even before it became explicitly enshrined as a right in the Constitution. But I do not know when the idea began that college education is a basic right of every citizen, which the State must provide for. I am sure it did not come from my generation. Perhaps, it came with the decline of basic education itself, when the high school diploma was no longer acceptable as proof of functional literacy, and employers began to require a college degree for even the simplest jobs. In any event, there was a surge in demand for college education in the 1980s.

The student population of UP itself has grown to more than 50,000. But its faculty and facilities have failed to keep in step with this phenomenal growth. Its classes are packed, and the faculty has little time for anything more than teaching. While many bright students still opt for an academic career upon graduation, very few remain after they have earned a second degree. The psychic reward of teaching in the country’s best university is simply not enough to keep them going. Not a few have painfully traded a promising life of scholarship for a better-paying call center job.

I am sure the desire to serve the country remains strong among our students. But, invariably, many of today’s UP graduates, like their generation, will leave the country and spend their most productive years abroad. No one in particular is to be blamed for this. And many come home yearly to perform medical missions. Others contribute generously to the university to support scholarships and various programs, in grateful recognition of the formative years they spent at UP.

But, clearly, the policy of subsidizing university education in the era of global labor mobility no longer makes much sense. If the goal were to provide college education to poor but deserving students, it would be more sensible to give out individual scholarships than to pay for the operations of a whole university. Indeed, if the only role of a public university were to provide higher instruction, there would be little reason for the State to run its own university. Private institutions all over the world are taking over this function because in many ways they do it more efficiently.

Why not close UP then? Why persist in running a state university on a dwindling budget that can no longer decently support the work of a higher learning institution?

The answer lies in the complex functions that a university performs in society. Any good university worth its name will not confine its work to teaching. It will insist on producing new knowledge through research. It will enrich and extend the horizon of existing culture, and promote its own world view in the larger society. It will assume the primary task of forming the nation’s leaders, of shaping their political consciousness, and equipping them with those traits and skills that mark them out as leaders. None of these functions are explicitly contained in any specific set of courses; they are integral to the learning process that uniquely belongs to all great universities. It is for these reasons, and no other, that a university deserves public subsidy.

cheat wave by anne susskind

Australia's education industry is worth more than $9.8 billion, but some academics believe almost half of all university students are cheating and they are powerless to stop it. Anne Susskind reports.

Plagiarism in university essays is so rife that bringing back compulsory exams may be the only way to stop it, warns an international expert on the globalisation of higher education.

"Plagiarism has knocked the stuffing out of the essay assignment," Simon Marginson says. "It has contaminated the essay badly, making it a waste of time as an educational project. Things have moved beyond the current regimes of assessment. The system has broken down."

With the cheating running out of control, many academics are ducking for cover, daring to speak only anonymously. The culture of silence is so strong that they refused to have their universities identified, fearing victimisation or bringing shame on their institutions, or damaging Australia's $9.8bn education export industry.

But Marginson, a professor at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, believes that only genuine academic excellence will protect the system. Cynicism about assessment is very corrosive, and being ahead in cleaning it up may be good for the market internationally, he says.

In Australia, 14% of students are plagiarists, according to a 2002 study in six universities commissioned by the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee. Some academics say the figure is much higher because overworked teachers are not detecting the cheating, or are not being encouraged to report it. Estimates are as high as 50% in the many courses which rely only on essay-based assessments. Marginson believes it to be "a significant minority".

The driving forces behind plagiarism are the internet, with its eight to 10 billion pages of information freely available, and the globalisation of the higher education system, which in Australia has brought an influx of about 240,000 foreign university students, or 25% of the student body, many of whom struggle with English.

The cheating is also seen as a reflection of the "short-cut" society and Generation Y's tendency to question the value and legitimacy of copyright and intellectual property.

While plagiarism is certainly not confined to international students, many, particularly from China, Thailand, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam, whose languages have a very different structure, find essay writing and studying in English difficult. They often have to work much harder than locals and many also have jobs and visas dependent on their results.

So, while risky, the use of the internet and other forms of plagiarism is "rational behaviour, of a kind, to make life manageable", says Marginson, adding that while an original piece might take three or four nights, students can plagiarise and even rewrite and scramble texts to avoid detection technologies in probably one night.

Local students are becoming agitated, too. English speakers complain that their courses are being dumbed down - particularly at post-graduate level, where classes are often largely composed of students with poor English.

But help may be at hand with Turnitin, a plagiarism-detection system licensed to 29 universities, over 80 secondary schools and nine TAFEs or other post-secondary institutions in Australia. Robyn Lovelock, managing director of Aldiss technologies, which licences the software in the Pacific region, says that at one Victorian university, when a lecturer said essays would be run through the technology, some students stood and clapped.

Academics say the divisions are clear, with English speakers clubbing together for group assessments and Asian students often left floundering. There has even been talk of streaming local and foreign students, but this is seen as discriminatory, as well as making the courses less attractive to full-fee foreign students.

Several universities are talking of raising International English Language Testing System scores - the entry tests for English proficiency. Others have employed staff to help students with rudimentary English and academic conventions. In a system spinning out of control, faculties are improvising, with schemes such as making students sign essay cover sheets declaring that they are not plagiarising.

Steve O'Connor, CEO of CAVAL Collaborative Solutions, which conducted the 2002 research for the vice-chancellors, says that while some institutions - such as the University of Newcastle, the University of Tasmania and Melbourne's RMIT - have good plagiarism-detection programs, not enough have serious campus-wide systems.

The academics The Bulletin spoke to report that universities often do not encourage them to report plagiarism, preferring that it be dealt with at a low level, or not at all, because of the fear of scandal. Federal government funding cuts mean there are more students and less money, and universities are unable to provide the rigour and one-on-one attention previously available. They felt that teachers were largely left to draw their own lines in the sand about whether they will pursue plagiarists.

One lecturer talked of overworked academics in a "factory-type environment", pointing out that the growing number of casuals in the academic workforce were not paid enough to make the extra effort of detecting plagiarism, while other staff were simply too busy.

Andrew Humphreys, a writer and former editor of Rolling Stone magazine who has recently given up teaching after several years at Macquarie, UTS and Sydney universities, says there was plagiarism at all three, and detecting it was a long, painful process. "There are the procedural hoops you need to jump through: the department to the head of department, and the oral warning - none of which you are paid to do at all as a casual academic - not to mention the initial sifting through the piece to prove plagiarism. And for every one you pick up, how many do you miss?

"The [detection] software is good up to a point, and once you read enough student papers, something will trigger in your mind, if you're not too tired and not working that day - a tone, or something that just feels like it may have been written by an American ... If students plagiarise and are getting away with it, it's not fair to students who aren't."

Plagiarism is one result of the user-pays university system, Humphreys says. Once students, particularly from overseas, are paying so much for a degree, they think they are automatically entitled to it. "Higher education is now one of Australia's biggest money-spinners, and when that much money is involved, people willingly turn a blind eye. If a high percentage of students were failing, they would go somewhere else."

Teachers also blame themselves. One casual academic says she is so pressured that she simply can't live up to her own standards: "If we evacuate our teaching, plagiarism inserts itself. If a student feels the teacher cares, they are much less inclined to plagiarise. If you think you are just a number, and a nuisance, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you abuse a system that doesn't care for you? The entire process is exhausting and depressing."

Some suggest academics are failing to grasp the ways their students are thinking as a result of the new information technologies. Dr Judy Sheard, a senior lecturer in Monash University's Faculty of Information Technology, says: "we haven't shifted to their way of operating and learning. They are focusing on certain skills - they're very good at multiple processing, they're not afraid of technology and they know where to find things - and we're still stuck pre-internet, and are not valuing those ..."

Another researcher says synaptic connections are changing as students' minds adapt to technologies which provide rapid ways to access information.

Dr Jeanne Dawson, associate director of Curtin University's Student Learning Support Centre, says detection technology represents a "focus on the negative" which punishes students already disadvantaged by their language difficulties. Instead, she says we need to re-establish academic integrity: "if we value certain things, the only way is to educate our students so that they share and value them, too.

"Students often cut and paste because they're not confident of their own view. I think a lot [of plagiarism] is either because students don't understand what it is, or out of desperation, and I think that all universities have a responsibility to establish learning conditions so that no student is in that position.

"Miners used to take a canary down [the mine], and if it fell off its perch, it was a sign that there's noxious gas, and they ought to get out of there. Plagiarism is almost like the dead canary, and sometimes it seems the effort is going into resuscitating the canary, when actually you should be looking at the whole environment."

Wednesday, October 18, 2006