The Maker is standing on a soccer field remembering those days when he chaperoned his son, Isagani, through many sorties, many football games. He is standing on a field that has a good potential to be a really good one. It is raised a few feet above its surroundings. This gives it potential to become a fine low-maintenance field. Rainwater will drain away naturally. The grass would have to grow but the field is good-quality topsoil. With a little work and a bit of imagination, this could be a really good playing field. But alas, it is imagination that is sometimes lacking in some people. Or do they simply suffer from a twisting of it?
It is over the issue of this field, the first issue of three, that Dean Enrique Avila is going to be temporarily suspended from his position at the University of the Philippines Cebu Campus. (The order circulates in the Internet but the formal copy is still to be delivered. Figure that out.) The charge is Gross Neglect of Duty. He allowed a construction company nearby to put excavated material on this very field allegedly for free and therefore “causing great prejudice to the university.”
What is an apple to one person’s eye is salt for another. It is easy to make even the good things appear as “causing prejudice to the university.” But the good people know immediately when people are trying to pull a sting operation, a “fast one,” over them. Before the excavation material was placed here and flattened, this field was a bad field, low-slung and easily flooded with ankle-breaking potholes hidden at its worst places. It has a potential to be a better field now. It would require a bit more excavation material and it would have to be graded but it would be an operation that would require a bit of non-revenue exchange-dealing between parties. The empty field becomes free dumping ground but at the end of it the soccer field becomes better. No money exchanged, just an official letter of approval passed through channels. What is so bad about that?
Can you lose your job over it?
As things finally turn out for Dean Avila, apparently, yes. Everyone knows that to be a good dean, you would have to take a bit of risk. One would have to leverage whatever resources one has to get the maximum effect. This is because official resources are few and far between. and a dean is expected to raise funds for the college whatever legal way. Everyone knows these things are inevitable. But yes, an “enemy” could apply a wee bit of malice and use it against you and file a complaint. And it might become convenient for some bureaucrat in the head office at UP Diliman to use it for ammunition for some secret battle happening somewhere in the high corridors of power.
There are, of course, other charges against him and two other officials. But it is intriguing how the charges against the two still orbit around the issue of the field. One of the officials was allegedly appointed by the dean to sit as head of a bidding committee of the college. This appointment was alleged to be “Grave Misconduct,” but on the other hand, the complaint mentions only the field and the appointment itself. No mention here of that official doing anything illegal or actionable except for recommending again the dean’s approval for the soccer field.
The third charge is the sweetest of all. The dean is cited for “Gross Neglect of Duty” for disbursing “3.0 Million” taken from a fund known in the university as “undergraduate tuition increment.” But there is nothing to say this disbursement was in any way illegal. What the charge says is that it is against “university policy.” The charge sheet also mentions that the dean informed his superiors formally about the disbursement. If this disbursement was Gross Neglect of Duty, the Maker would like to personally thank Dean Enrique Avila for it. University policy be damned!
What was the disbursement for? It became the UP centennial bonus for all employees of the college, ironically, including those who now secretly plot in the dark shadows. The dean took this risk for his people and now risks losing everything. It is not because he is dishonest. It would be near impossible for a logical person to even come close to construing that from the charge sheet. What the charge sheet simply shows is that he has enemies. The type who would use even the merest risky act and make it appear as the gravest of sins, people who like to conjure the illusion of a garbage dump from what would have been a perfectly fine football field if only they imagined without malice.
The situation at UP Cebu requires attention from the people of this city. It is our best access to public tax money earmarked for the prestigious national state university. The only other access would be to send our children to the National Capital, an option increasingly becoming more burdensome and risky. UP Cebu could be a great UP unit. But the Cebuanos would have to give critical attention to any political pressure exerted upon it by the head office at Diliman. If the dean goes, that can only mean the UP Cebu academic community is and will be more helpless against it in the future. We do well to ask “why?”