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. With Inquirer Research