SHORT REPORT ON THIS MORNING’S SPECIAL BOR MEETING, JULY 14

Dr. Judy Taguiwalo, Faculty Regent

July 14, 2010

This morning, the special BOR meeting was held in spite of the brownout (the Board Room in Quezon Hall has a generator for lighting and for four electric fans). The meeting approved the criteria for the search for the next UP President. The call for nomination starts on July 15 until August 25. Actual selection will be done in late November 2010. Please check the UP website where the details of the search will be posted.

The Board also affirmed its authority to decide on appeal for tenure of UP faculty after the faculty has gone through the various appeals’ level in the university. It also asked the UP President to ensure the implementation of the May 27 BOR decision granting tenure to Prof. Sarah Raymundo who up to now has no appointment, no loading and no salary.

This was also the last meeting of Chairman Angeles as Dr. Patricia Licuanan takes over as CHED Chair on July 19. The All UP Workers Union extended its thanks to Chairman Angeles for his support for the tenure of Prof. Raymundo, his stand against the privatization of PGH through the FMAB.

The regular July BOR meeting is on July 29, 9 am at Quezon Hall. d a� ` t o �Ov �u the earlier decisions of the President and the various layers of authority and officials under her. We take issue with the arguments of the aforementioned statement for the following reasons:

1. The BOR represents an essential element of the system of checks and balances within the University, it is not a mere rubber stamp of the President. It has the authority and responsibility to decide on appeals based on their respective merits. The BOR can make decisions upon matters where other administrative levels of the University are perceived to have failed. The UP President is definitely not an infallible being like the Pope.

2. The fact that the President or the several levels of authority under her have made various and sometimes conflicting decisions on the matter is not at issue. The actual substance of the President’s final decision and, ultimately, that of the Department of Sociology are precisely what are being questioned. The President just tossed back the nagging problem of Prof. Raymundo’s tenure to the Department of Sociology without acting on the substance of her appeal regarding the mysterious lack of transparency on the criteria used in its decision against granting her tenure.

3. According to the “Statement of Concern,” “the best judge of whether a faculty member is fit to join the ranks of tenured faculty members in a particular Department rests with the faculty members of that Department.” This is indeed true as long as exclusively academic criteria are used to decide tenure. The procedure for tenure has to balance the right of the tenured faculty to make a qualitative judgement on the candidate for tenure and the equally sacred right of the the temporary faculty to “expect fairness, both in the process by which the tenure decision is reached and in the substance of that decision. The appeal procedure should take into account both these rights.” (“Shaping Our Institutional Future: A Statement on Faculty Tenure, Rank and Promotion” (OVPAA, 2004)). Faculty Regent Judy Taguiwalo has correctly emphasized that the Department of Sociology has never revealed the academic criteria, if any, it used to decide against granting tenure to Prof. Raymundo.

4. Lacking any proper investigation undertaken by a formal body, the statement was also mistaken in asserting without proof that there was “an absence of manifest discrimination and abuse of discretion” in the present case.

No one has denied that Prof. Raymundo has fulfilled all the academic requirements for tenure as defined in the faculty manual. To just accept the President’s decision on faith equates departmental autonomy with the tyranny of numbers while never explaining the actual or real basis for the denial of tenure. We hereby reiterate that using non-academic criteria to decide upon tenure will not only endanger academic freedom but will also lead to a precipitous decline in academic excellence. Indeed, as the statement of concern points out, the procedure for the conferment of tenure needs to be stringent to protect academic excellence. However, the process of deciding tenure itself needs to be clear and transparent in the same measure in order to ensure that arbitrariness does not take the place of stringency.

The BOR granted tenure to Prof. Raymundo because of the simple fact that she had fulfilled, if not exceeded, all the academic criteria the University requires from its tenured faculty. We congratulate the majority of the BOR for taking a stand to uphold the appeals process and for making sure that the young untenured faculty can once again expect fairness as a matter of course in the crucial matter regarding their applications for tenure. Maraming salamat po!