New UP charter boosts research, salaries, status [ By Marian Z. Codilla | Cebu Daily News]

Taken from The Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 30, 2008 issue, the
article follows:

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New UP charter boosts research, salaries, status

By Marian Z. Codilla
Cebu Daily News

CEBU CITY—Finally, after a century of existence, the University of the
Philippines (UP) has a new charter that will help put it on equal
footing with its international counterparts by, among other things,
allowing it to significantly raise the salaries of its faculty,
improve its facilities and enhance its research capabilities.

The new charter will exempt the UP, the country’s premier university,
from the Salary Standardization Act to help avert the exodus of its
teaching staff to private schools in the country or abroad.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo Tuesday signed the new UP charter at
the UP Visayas Cebu City campus.

“With this law, may the minds produced by UP become the 21st century
exemplars of the famed Oblation that endures as a symbol of a
university offering itself to the Filipino people,” Ms Arroyo said.

Founded on June 18, 1908, UP has produced seven of the country’s 14
presidents, 12 chief justices, 30 of 31 national scientists, 36 of 57
national artists, some 15,000 doctors, 8,000 lawyers and 23,000
teachers.

Students at UP (over 50,000) are called “iskolar ng bayan” (the
nation’s scholars) because their education is subsidized by the
government.

Sen. Francis Pangilinan, an alumnus and principal author of the law
creating the new charter, said the charter would enable the university
to cope with the changing times.

In an earlier statement, Pangilinan said that De La Salle University
and Ateneo de Manila University professors were receiving salaries
two-and-a-half to three times more than those in UP.

The new charter also exempts university assets and earnings from taxes.

P500-million centennial gift

With the new charter, the university would be entitled to a
P500-million “centennial gift,” which would be released over the next
five years at P100 million each year.

The P100 million would be spent for faculty development and other
projects of each constituent university.

The centennial gift “is in addition to the P200 million we gave the
PGH (Philippine General Hospital) in 2006 and 2007, and in addition to
the P500 million for the science and technology complex in Diliman,”
Ms Arroyo said.

In the General Appropriations Act, the UP system’s budget for 2007 was
P4.8 billion.

The University of the Philippines has seven constituent universities
in strategic parts of the country, including Cebu. Each constituent
university has a chancellor.

The President said the university would lead the efforts in honing the
skills of Filipino workers through engineering as well as research
management and development.

Create technology

This, in turn, would create technology and bring science and
technology to the doorstep of the Filipino nation, Ms Arroyo said.

With the new charter, the university chancellors and councils would be
the highest academic body within each constituent university.

The President noted that the new UP charter would protect students’
democratic access, strengthen the universities’ administrator to the
board of regents and uphold academic freedom.

Unesco benchmark

Speaking after the signing ceremony, Ms. Arroyo said that the country
needs to produce more engineers and scientists as she cited the
benchmark of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO).

In 2004, UNESCO found that in developing countries there should be 340
scientists and engineers for every one million people. However, in the
Philippines, there are only 48 scientists and engineers for every one
million Filipinos.

To boost the country’s efforts to improve competitiveness, the
President said the government had invested P3 billion in engineering
research and development technology.

The P500-million science and technology complex on the UP campus in
Diliman, Quezon City would help promote engineering, research and
management development activities in the country.

World class

Ms Arroyo acknowledged that Filipino engineers would be at the
forefront in the 21st century Philippines. She considered the
country’s engineers the engines for national growth because they would
help spawn high-tech firms.

“Investors know the caliber of our human resources. The great Filipino
worker is world class,” she said.

In the THES-QS World University Rankings in 2006, UP was No. 1 in the
Philippines. It ranked 299 among the world’s top 500 universities. La
Salle was at No. 392, Ateneo 484, and University of Santo Tomas, 500.

UP saw its ranking drop to 398 in 2007.

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