By Ruchie Mark D. Pototanon
All UP Academic Employees Union-Iloilo
Even good things must come to an end; unfortunately, some things do not even start well to begin with.
Three years have passed since Dr. Ricardo Babaran stood at the helm of the University of the Philippine Visayas. As his voyage culminates, it is worth looking at the university’s lot under his administration.
Entering mid-semester in October 2017, the first months under him was a true honeymoon period. Perhaps due to the remnants of the past administration and his involvement in it, no perceptible changes (negative or positive) were felt. Furthermore, his past appointment as the Vice Chancellor for Research and Extension poised him as an advocate of “research” – a word that he mentions quite too many in a day, as he himself is a man of few words.
In 2018, the events that followed showed that the honeymoon period was more like the calm before the storm.
The first blow came at the delay of the release the Union members’ CNA incentive for 2017, which the UPV employees only received in March. But the greater furor was caused by his memo RPB 2018-07-0, which attempted to discourage teaching overload by categorically stating that the claims for renumerations for such service rendered will not be entertained by the university.
Although this appears to strengthen the research capacity of the university, it denies the reality that overloads are necessary because the university lacks enough teachers. Furthermore, instead of incentivizing, the Memo punishes the faculty for taking extra work by denial of compensation. Such is clearly anti-labor and the Chancellor had to issue a clarifying memo RPB 2018 -12-113, three months after. It states then that overload will be paid, provided that requests for overload will be made early, a month before the start of classes. This further ignores the reality that course offerings and schedules are not final until the first week of classes. The three-month lull between memos was rather short. Rather than receiving their overload honoraria a little after the end of the semester, the remuneration came six months late, already in July.
Worse is the lot of contractual workers in the university whose 2019 20% salary increment is delayed for more than a year, one of the most delayed payments in the entire UP system!
That is not an isolated case because, at different levels and instances, delays have almost become the norm. For instance, the 2019 Faculty Merit Promotions was delayed for almost a week. Not only the UPV based guidelines were released much later, but the deadlines were also moved further by a week. This cut the time for appeals at the local level. This also shortened the time to notify the faculty of their deficiencies and crumped the strategies to comply with them. This caused much distress to the teachers who were torn between their teaching duties and dealing with the rut of their promotions.
In a similar but much worse manner, the non-teaching staff continues to be in limbo. There is no promotion for the Staff and REPS until now, and Chancellor Babaran sounded silent until the end.
Along with the employees’ welfare, the Babaran administration had to deal with environmental problems. UP Miag-ao Campus experienced one of its worst water crises beginning late February 2018. But more than the lack of water, the UPV community decried the lack of consultation in the management of the crisis. Water supply was provided thrice a day but in unholy hours of 5-AM, 12-noon and 6-PM. Bathrooms in the campus stank and some students were even forced to put their class activities on hold due to the lack of water in their laboratories. After more than a month of suffering, members of the UPV community staged a mobilization rally on April 8, 2018 to demand more water which was readily acceded by the Vice Chancellors present. Chancellor Babaran was absent during the said negotiations, a phenomenon that constantly happened during his term.
His absence was also nagging at the eve of the COVID Pandemic. With no clear leader in sight, it took time for the university to have a working Task Force. While local government units (LGUs) in Panay island have been planning to implement lockdowns as early as March 12, the first Task Force only began meeting March 19, 2020. It also had to be regrouped on March 24, 2020, already a week into the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ). Due to this delay, some students were not able to go back to their hometowns, and were either housed in the dormitories or remained in their boarding houses.
Just as the national responses to the pandemic were haphazard, stranded students and employees were also subjected to the same twists and turns. On March 15, Chancellor Babaran released a Memo which declared the “No Work No Pay” arrangements for contractual employees, while other Chancellors in various campuses in System assured all employees of compensation during the pandemic.
On March 21, the university administration attempted to return Panay-based students to their homes. However, as they crossed the Capiz provincial border, the buses ferrying them were not allowed to pass, to their dismay. And accepting the fact they will not be home soon, those who were stranded in the dormitories attempted to make a semblance of their homes. To save on cash, they started making their own meals and planning their market trips. However, this secure feeling of domesticity was shattered when Babaran attempted to forbid the student to cook in the dormitories. He announced that meals will be provided by the UPV-Employees Cooperative (to the disappointment of the students), with some sort of assistance from the University in the form of limited meal vouchers. This did not sit well with the students who stood against it and managed to negotiate being allowed to cook somewhere or to buy food from providers of their choice.
Throughout his term, there has been an abundance of statements on different issues. The pandemic itself has resulted in a sort of statement war. When constituents would pose calls to action or responses to policies (like the attempt to return the students), the Office of the Chancellor would also issue one in reply (or in defense of its decision), albeit belatedly. However, the flimsy use of words was glaring from the start, not just during the pandemic but through earlier issues that the Babaran administration had encountered.
On July 24, 2019, the Miag-ao local police attempted to profile the members of the Academic Union, by requesting information on its members. It took the University almost half a month to release a lukewarm statement in defense of the unionists. Similarly, the cheering routine by the Skimmers which led to online harassment of students and faculty by fanatics of President Duterte only yielded lame words which encouraged students to think “critically”.
The recent red-tagging of faculty and students, coupled with the enactment of the Terror Law this year, led to short, nebulous statements which left most of the university’s constituents confused. These short blurbs were gnomes compared to the lengthy statements that were released as reply and call to action from Diliman Campus Chancellor. But longer is not always better, as some statements were laden with empty words like “holding hands” to fight COVID or institutional conceits as when the “farmers from Miagao” are blamed for putting pumps that competed with the University’s water supply.
Indeed, as red-tagged professor Tomasito Talledo put in a poem, the “Barbarian” denied his constituents’ claims through his, “lying tongues, funky memorandum,/ zoom meetings, and hard-headedness,” even as he did to the tumandok farmers of Miagao.
As his term comes to a close, new problems begin to emerge. Although these are problems of the whole UP System, it seems to have been magnified in the case of UP Visayas. The transition to online classes necessitated the use of a Learning Management System (LMS). The problem, however, is that the LMS was only introduced a week before enrolment began, and only two weeks before classes started. The waiver of fees for students who do not qualify for free tuition only came on the last day of enrolment. Worse everyone is still clueless at the moment how the modules will be sent to students without gadgets and it is already on the third week of classes. The faculty and the staff employees have not received any aid yet for their transition to work from home arrangements.
The building discontent might have been a strong rallying point for constituents to support his contender, Dr. Clement Camposano. Camposano whose selection is a matter of celebration for many in the UP Visayas, is still someone to watch out for. Three years of discontent has led to three years of vigilance and one loud call for a change in the leadership. Our hopes are too many to pin on one person, but the university as a whole needs to re-examine its raison d’etre as an institution – not to be obsessed with World Rankings, but to be the university of the people, not just for the constituents within its walls but also of the suffering nation and of the world.
