Daily TribuneTo parents who send their children to UP to graduate and become successful in their chosen endeavors, ending up with a dead son or daughter killed in the name of godless communism is a tragedy of the saddest kind.
The University of the Philippines has been, since time immemorial, considered the premier tertiary educational institution in the Philippines. Many of its alumni have been national leaders or were instrumental in shaping the nation's history.
Lately, however, UP President Danilo Concepcion has good reason to be upset. According to the latest Times Higher Education's World University Rankings list, UP is no longer the country's top university, a status UP held since it was included in the listing in 2017. Ateneo now ranks above UP.
As expected, many UP alumni are unpleasantly surprised. Concepcion, in particular, is dismayed because the drop in UP's ranking took place during his watch as UP president.
Many UP alumni are asking how and why this happened.
Several pragmatic UP alumni have made some very interesting observations.
For one, the UP faculty had been complacent in the thought that UP will always be the number one university, a status it has held for the longest time. Almost religiously, they believed that the UP brand will carry UP forever.
As a result of that complacency, the quality of teaching and learning at UP became stagnant, with a few exceptions here and there.
Many faculty members, including some with doctorate degrees, are unable to leave the realm of theory and have no basic sense of the outside world. They have become hard put to communicate ideas to their students and are more concerned about sounding intellectually highfalutin to underscore their "scholarly" status.
For another, members of the UP faculty have always thought that the screening process for student admission to UP assures that only the best and the brightest pupils will enter UP.
That may be so in the past, but it isn't so today.
One factor in UP's current situation is the rampant and unchecked spread of communist ideology and activities among UP students, particularly in UP's Diliman and Los Baños campuses.
It is common knowledge that UP has become the main source of young recruits for the local communist movement. Many UP students, as young as college freshmen, are enticed to quit school and join the rebel movement in the mountains. Quite a number of them end up killing and getting killed in armed conflicts with the military in remote areas in the countryside.
To parents who send their children to UP to graduate and become successful in their chosen endeavors, ending up with a dead son or daughter killed in the name of godless communism is a tragedy of the saddest kind.
Thus, among parents who can afford a private college education for their bright children, many of them prefer to enroll their kids in universities other than UP.
That malady reduces the volume of really outstanding students who enroll in UP at present times. In turn, it leads to a deterioration in the quality of students enlisted in UP.
One embarrassing proof of that observation is provided by a past chairman of the UP Los Baños University Student Council. In 2021, when the haughty kid was interviewed on television about his views on police presence inside UP campuses, he proved to be an embarrassment for UP because he was hopelessly inarticulate. Evidently, the guy spent more time on student activism rather on his studies.
Essentially, that means the taxpayers are subsidizing UP students not to study, but to become radicals. No wonder UP is deteriorating.
Moreover, UP faculty members now spend more time on partisan politics rather than on academic work.
In 2021, UP Diliman's University Council, the main assembly of its faculty, formally opposed the nomination of UP alumnus Harry Roque (a close ally of then President Rodrigo Duterte) to the International Law Commission. In that assembly of non-lawyers, the UP faculty present there (none of whom have a thorough understanding of International Law), said Roque is unfit to be a member of the ILC!
To repeat, no wonder UP is deteriorating.
