Blurs and distortions

If there is a campus issue that remains to be misunderstood even if the damage has been done, it would definitely be the tuition fee increase or TFI. We have reflected on the death of Cris Mendez together with the mainstream media, but we remain callous to UP education’s decay as a public institution happening before us. Ironically, the argument of financial survival through the tuition fee increase serves the impending doom of our country’s premiere state university.

One of the most common misconceptions that I hear from fellow students and professors is that the tuition increase will avert the state of decay of classrooms and facilities. That reasoning is anchored on the false presumption which equates the increase to the purchase of new facilities and renovation of classrooms. Computing the income that will be generated at full implementation of TFI up to 2010 hardly justifies this wishful thinking. Of course, everyone wants to upgrade the quality of instructional materials, but subscribing to this fallacy will only reflect a decaying reasoning.

Perhaps it is significant to point out that TFI does not exist in a vacuum. It is not merely a result of huge budget cuts; it is a manifestation of long-standing educational policies of the government that are prescribed by World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Higher Modernization Act (HEMA) of 1997 and the Long Term Higher Educational Development Plan (LTHEDP) explain the skewed sense of priority of government that is inclined to debt servicing. The tuition fee increases in other state universities and colleges (SUCs) and the declining number of SUCs in the country are clear indicators that these policies are at work.

Such neoliberal policies are tucked under the rhetoric that “everybody has needs.” The insistent demand for greater state subsidy for UP is often construed as an underestimation of the needs of other SUCs that share the same pie. However, that thinking pits accessible education against accessible education, conjuring the necessity for competition for a measly allocation while leaving out the huge allocation for debt servicing and military spending from the bigger picture.

In the face of dwindling state subsidy, UP is pushed to embrace the logic of commercialization as the last resort for financial survival, which coincides pretty well to the intentions of HEMA and LTHEDP. Alongside the tuition fee increase, event sponsorships and business concessionaires have become the source of funds for the miscellaneous expenditures and maintenance of colleges. In the College of Home Economics for instance, the presence of Figaro is justified by its functionality in training students and its financial assistance to the college.

Yet such half-capacity dependence on income-generating tie-ups negates the demand for greater state subsidy, since government funding is inversely proportional to the private assistance the university gets. An increase in the revolving fund (or the income generated by the university) has a corresponding decrease in the subsidy that the university receives. Furthermore, the intrusion of commercial interests into academic spaces has a stifling effect to the exercise of academic discourse, as business entities will always preclude anything that will go against the profit motive.

What is probably more alarming is that the TFI and its consequence of commercialization undermine the democratic access to higher education. In a poor country like the Philippines, raising the cost of higher education will place the universal right to education farther from the reach of poor but deserving students, creating a barrier that will deepen the wounds of social inequality. The STFAP on which the TFI is anchored hardly dilutes the general impact of the increase and only rationalizes the socio-economic discrepancy in the society, reinforcing the myth of poverty and the tale of the filthy rich.

Quite surprisingly, the broad component of the UP studentry has remained passive despite the contradictions of this glaring anti-student policy. While some assert that they are against the tuition fee increase, mere sympathies can do nothing to overturn the Board of Regents’ decision unless translated into signatures and chants. It is only through visible participation in the general stream of protest that the UP administration can gauge the opposition of the students. Now that the fight to junk TFI has reached the Congress, there is no reason to withdraw confidence in the fight to assert the right to education.

Unless students have acquired a distorted perception of their rights, which means that the university of the Iskolar ng Bayan is doomed.