UPAlumni.net

Francisco Nemenzo
18th President, University of the Philippines
Source: UP System Website

FRANCISCO “Dodong” NEMENZO, Ph.D. served the University of the Philippines for 46 years as professor of Political Science, as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of U.P. Diliman (1976-1981), as Faculty Regent (1988-1989), as Chancellor of UP Visayas (1989-1992) and as UP’s 18th President (1999-2005). He retired at the age of 70 last February 9, 2005.

This is one day I will not forget — my 70th birthday, my last day as president, and the end of 46 years of service. Your presence makes this day even more memorable. I see in the audience friends who touched my life at different times and in various ways. I am very glad to see University officials from the late 1970s who entrusted me with my first administrative assignment as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences — President O. D. Corpuz and his then Executive Vice President Emanuel Soriano. Narito rin ang mga kasamahan ko sa kilusan. May isang jeepney ng mga magsasaka na nanggaling pa sa Pampanga (My peers in the movement are also here. A jeep-load of farmers even came all the way from Pamapanga).

All UP presidents have been inspired by the same vision of UP. All of us wanted UP to be a center of excellence. But each of us had his own idea of how to bring this about. Mine was outlined in my vision paper, elaborated in my investiture address, and concretized in the UP Five Year Plan.

By my own reckoning, my administration has accomplished 90 percent of the targets I set. The remaining 10 percent consisted of projects that depended on factors beyond our control, like the new University Charter and the Science and Technology Park. To pass an objective judgment on my administration, please wait for my end-of-term report, which will be coming out shortly. But let me give you some highlights from that report.

Before I became president, I noted with anguish that UP was drifting to mediocrity, and I pointed out the urgent need to reverse this trend before it became irreversible. With my team of vice presidents and chancellors, we have done that to a large extent. But the quest for academic excellence is a never-ending process. It is forever a work in progress that needs to be sustained. Because President Emerlinda Roman was part of my team, I am confident about the future with her at the helm.

The innovations we introduced and the hard decisions we had to make in order to translate academic excellence from a buzzword to an operational principle were not universally applauded. For example, when I deplored “collegiality” as a euphemism for the mutual toleration of mediocrity, there was loud opposition. But I would have been disappointed if I had been met with silence. The ensuing controversies gave me a chance to explain the reasons underlying these decisions. When a policy statement does not provoke a controversy, the rest of the community will ignore it as another routine memorandum.

The controversies during my term revolved around issues of consequence, like the purpose of general education, the commercialization of assets, the policies on admissions, the prioritization of science and technology, the emphasis on publications in international journals, and the extent of institutional autonomy. Of course, there were also furious demonstrations over the rerouting of traffic, that dao tree in Los Baños, the back-COLA, and the appointments of chancellors and deans. But these they did not deflect attention from the truly serious issues in higher education.

As soon as we came on board, I stopped further expansion because in my view UP had already grown beyond capacity. I called for a pause in the institution of new courses and urged a critical review of the existing ones. We stated the goals of this review in unequivocal terms: to upgrade the mediocre degree programs and abolish those beyond repair.

While going through this painful surgical exercise, we also took steps to improve our faculty profile. We sent 100 faculty members for doctoral studies here and abroad. When they return as PhDs, their departments may revive the proposals we consigned to the freezer.

Since the Salary Standardization Law inhibits us from raising salaries across the board, we did the next best thing to retain the best and the brightest in the faculty. We offered generous rewards for demonstrated achievements in research and creative work. To encourage outstanding professors to teach more, we increased the honorarium rates for overload teaching.

With this same goal of retaining the best and the brightest in the faculty, we invested heavily in the modernization of laboratories and libraries. Having been a longtime member of the faculty myself, I know that a congenial work environment is the strongest motivation for committed scholars. Anyone who enters teaching knows that nobody gets rich in academia. We can all grumble about the low pay, but we can also do something to assure our best teachers and researchers that UP is still the only place where they can find the freedom, the intellectual companionship, and the facilities to explore the world of ideas.

My administration sought to maximize the system of psychic rewards. We have tried to provide them the tools they need to pursue their research interests. With the help of the UP Alumni Association, we considerably improved our computer-student ratio — one of the factors that brought us down in the Asiaweek survey. In the last five and a half years, we set up more computer rooms in academic buildings and dormitories. We also established a computer loan program to enable faculty members and staff to buy their own computers. We installed fiber-optic backbones in all our major campuses, so that 83 percent of the computers throughout UP now form local area networks. And we have interconnected these campus networks across the entire UP System.

For faster access to the Internet, we increased our bandwidth 26 times. That is why we now broadcast live traditional UP events like the lantern parades and general reunions to evoke nostalgia in our alumni in the provinces and overseas. With our new teleconferencing facility, students in eight campuses may now attend the same lectures simultaneously. In this way the students in far-flung campuses get to feel they belong to one university.

Modernization has opened up possibilities we could only imagine earlier. Scholars in different constituent universities can now undertake joint research without the need for frequent face-to-face meetings. In the College of Engineering some courses are offered jointly with MIT and Berkeley. When the presidents of the leading universities in the Asia-Pacific region meet to explore possible areas for research collaboration, the question invariably arises: Do we have fast Internet access and teleconferencing facilities? UP would have been left out if we did not modernize our computer system.

We have paid attention to the mundane concerns of our students. Most classrooms still leave much to be desired, but the classrooms in some colleges have been refurbished through the generous assistance of our alumni. The legendary queues at registration time are now a thing of the past. Students need not cut short their holidays because they can pre-register through the Internet. Heeding Adrian Cristobal’s advice not to overlook the little things, we fixed the toilets in all academic buildings throughout the UP System.

For the benefit of faculty and students, we introduced dramatic changes in our libraries. We have digitized the catalogues in all unit libraries and linked them to the Internet so that anyone anywhere can check the holdings of all our libraries through the On-line Public Access Catalogue. At considerable expense, we have subscribed to international databases like OVID and ProQuest. Henceforth, no faculty member can blame the lack of up-to-date literature for not doing research or for lecturing with antiquated notes.

The paucity of our faculty’s publications in ISI-indexed journals was another reason for our miserable performance in the last Asiaweek survey five years ago. We employed the carrot and stick approach to remedy this. We required at least one published work for rank promotion and we offered P55,000 for every article in an ISI-indexed journal. As a result, the number of articles by our faculty in internationally refereed journals doubled since that last Asiaweek survey.

Good teaching alone will not make UP stand out. Professors in other schools can teach just as well. What distinguishes a university is the volume and quality of its published research. It is on this basis — not how many of its graduates top the licensure examinations — that the leading universities in the world evaluate each other. Based on this criterion, UP is second to none in the Philippines and, if the trend continues, UP will again be acknowledged as one of the best in Asia.

A university must think ahead and prepare itself for the future. Considering the recent advances in computer and communication technologies, we anticipate the increasing use of interactive media for instruction. The UP Open University has pioneered in the production of computer-based instructional materials. We want to promote this system-wide; thus, we have set up Interactive Learning Centers in eight campuses and provided each of them with production facilities. If faculty members — individually or in interdisciplinary teams — make full use of these facilities and produce such materials, this will greatly enhance the effectiveness of the traditional modes of teaching.

In the search for president in 1999, I took the risk of being eliminated by declaring that fund raising is not my forte and I believe that a university president is primarily an academic leader, not a businessman. It turned out, however, that I was not a bad fund-raiser after all. From August 1999 to September 2004, we were able to raise P812 million for the Modernization Fund in the UP Foundation. That compares well with what my predecessors raised.

But I do not claim all the credit for this. Much of the credit goes to the faculty members who crafted good project proposals. Our success vindicated my position that the big donors do not give because they like the President; they give because they like specific projects.

My detractors said during the search that my Leftist reputation would scare potential donors and corporate partners away. But I did not have to conceal my deeply-held convictions. I continued to express my aversion to neoliberal globalization. I did not cease to speak against indiscriminate liberalization, deregulation, and privatization. In my commencement address in 2002, with some members of the diplomatic corps present, I attacked the Visiting Forces Agreement and the Balikatan exercises. When the US invaded Iraq, I joined the chorus of protests. But these did not stop the flow of funds into our Modernization Program. As one banker told me, “I do business with the communists in China, so why should I mind your ideology?”

Neither did I have to go around with a begging bowl. What I did — in line with my role as academic leader — was to prod and inspire the faculty to work out plans for useful research and technology development projects. All that the potential donors expect from the President is an assurance that he will support their sponsored projects and their donation will not be used for something else.

It is tempting to whine about a budget cut to make the UP community mad at the government. In fairness to the national government, however, I should dispel the impression that our budget is being cut every year. In fact, it was only in the year 2000 that UP suffered a real budget cut.

What some students refer to as a “cut” in the proposed 2005 budget pertains to an item under capital outlay, representing the Philippine counterpart to a Spanish grant for the Department Emergency Medicine Services Complex of the PGH. A capital outlay is always a one-shot deal. Since the construction of this project has been completed, that that item is no longer part of our next budget.

Anyone who does a serious study of financing a state university should not just look at the budget. He should also find out how much of the budget was released. DBM (Department of Budget Management) is not obliged to release all that has been allotted in the General Appropriations Act. Thanks to incumbent Budget Secretary Emilia Boncodin and her predecessor, Secretary Benjamin Diokno, DBM has been releasing 98 to 100 percent of the annual UP budget. That is far more than what we were getting before.

In 2000, the year when the Senator John Osmeña cut our budget, we were not crippled — as he must have intended — because the DBM released more of our budget that year than in the year before. Moreover, we were able to get from then President Joseph Estrada P200 million out of his discretionary fund, the biggest promotion fund ever.

More important than getting a budget is using wisely what we already have. Unless this is done, any budgetary increase will just go to waste. Thus, at the start of my administration, we straightened out our academic priorities and aligned our Internal Operating Budget with this priority scheme. We mobilized the funds that were lying idle in over-endowed units and redistributed these to programs that really count. We simply followed the rule that those departments which come up with clear and feasible plans for improvement will get as much as they need, while the rest will get only what they have always been getting. Sayang lamang kung buhusan natin ng pondo iyong hindi makapagpakita ng kakayahang tumulong sa sarili.(It will only be wasteful if we allot funds for those who do not exhibit the ability to help themselves.)

Whatever success my administration has attained is due largely to a superb team of vice presidents, chancellors, and Office of the President staff whose counsel, initiatives, resourcefulness, and energy made the job of running this university easier and more fun. I could not have assembled a better team. The team held together from the beginning to the end. We always acted in concert. When it was necessary to stand firm, we stood firm; when it was necessary to fight back, we fought back. We had our weaknesses, but we could not be faulted for bickering nor for the absence of a political will.

Since I am retiring, friends have asked what I will do afterwards. I promised to give them my answer in this my farewell speech.

In the next few months, I will read all the books I was unable to read due to the pressure of work. I will spend more time with my family. I will polish some manuscripts for publication. Since the Board of Regents has appointed me Professor Emeritus effective on the day I retire, I will teach whenever I am in the mood for teaching, no longer as a matter of obligation.

One privilege of heading a great university is getting to know people with brilliant and useful ideas. Just as President S.P. Lopez upon retirement gathered a dozen of us to visualize the Philippines in the 21st century, I plan to bring together the best brains in UP and in the progressive movement to craft a Blueprint for a Feasible Alternative.

UP has the finest collection of brains in the country. We have tapped them to deal with the problems of the University. But we should do that for the country as well. I am in a better position to organize a think tank now that I am no longer saddled with administrative responsibilities.

As a young man filled with revolutionary fervor, I used to enjoy heckling the rich and the powerful. This is all right when the country is doing well and it is necessary to shake people out of complacency. But when the country is in crisis, habitual faultfinding is counterproductive. It promotes cynicism, and there is no greater obstacle to change than cynicism among the people. Cynics do not fight for change, they look for an escape, they emigrate. If we as a people lose faith in our own capacity to create a better future, we can never transcend the current mess. It is time to think of an alternative program, but a feasible one around which the people can rally.

Pero sa totoo lamang, mahina na ang tuhod ko sa pagmamartsa-martsa. Dapat kong gampanan ang iba namang papel sa pakikibaka. Hindi na masyadong kailangang ilantad pa ang kabulukan ng sistema. Kitang-kita na ito sa lahat. (The truth is, my knees are getting weak from marching in demonstrations. I should serve a different role in the struggle. The rotting system need not be exposed anymore. It is there for everyone to see.) Even Frankie Sionil Jose has called for a revolution! Ang hinahanap ng bansa ngayon ay isang komprehensibo at napag-aralang programang nakatuon sa kung saan tayo tutungo at kung ano ang dapat nating gawin. (What the country needs now is a comprehensive and well-planned program that will focus on where we need to go and what we need to do to get there.)

Some media people in Cebu have pestered me about a rumored plan to run for public office, like one of my predecessors did. My answer is a categorical “No.” I don’t have the charm, the money, nor the stomach for electoral politics. Besides, and more importantly, I do not see traditional politics as the path to national salvation.

Hindi mahalaga kung sino ang lider. Ilang ulit na tayong nagpapalit ng Pangulo subalit patuloy pa rin ang pagkabulok ng ating lipunan. Mas mahalaga, sa paniwala ko, ay ang pagpaliwanag sa masa kung anong landas ang dapat nating tahakin, at kung ano ang dapat nating gawin upang makalikha ng tunay na bagong lipunan na progresibo, malaya at makatarungan. Ang pwersa na makapagbabago ng lipunan ay ang mulat na sambayanan, hindi ang mga pulitiko. (It does not matter who the leader is. We have gone through so many Presidents and yet society remains in a state of ruin. What is more important, I believe, is to explain to the masses what path we should take, and what we need to do in order to create a truly new society that is progressive, free, and just. The force that can change society is an informed citizenry, not the politicians.)

Hanggang dito na lang, mga kasama at kaibigan. Maraming salamat sa inyong lahat. (I have to end here, comrades and colleagues. Thank you to all of you.) Thank you, every one. Farewell, my beloved University. I have done my best for you.

* Farewell speech delivered at a special concert – “Parangal kay PFN” – on 9 February 2005, Abelardo Hall, UP Diliman.

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