Most UP Diliman professors favor August opening

QUEZON CITY, Philippines – More teachers from the University of the Philippines (UP) campus in Diliman, Quezon City, voted on Monday in favor of the plan to move the opening of classes to August.

Of the over 1,000 members of the Diliman University Council, 284 expressed their support for the proposal, 164 voted against it while there were eight abstentions. Although only 456 participated in the voting process, the presence of only 75 members is required for a quorum to be declared, according to the faculty manual.

The council—which is composed of all assistant professors and full professors in UP Diliman—held a special meeting on the controversial plan to move the school opening to August, a move that will be implemented this coming school year in seven other UP campuses.

UP Diliman Chancellor Dr. Michael Tan presided over Monday’s meeting which lasted for three hours, according to UP Vice President for public affairs Prospero de Vera.

“It was a lengthy discussion. The voting was specific; whether to approve the shift of opening of classes to August 2014,” he said in an interview.

A recent referendum showed that 647 of the 954 regular faculty members in UP Diliman were in favor of the change with 499 saying they wanted it implemented this year.

On the other hand, 281 out of 293 instructors—who are not considered part of the regular faculty—also expressed their support for the shift. Of the 281, 215 said it should begin this year while 67 wanted it to start next school year.

The University Student Council, meanwhile, also held a campus-wide consultation which showed that 1,834 out of 2,728 students approved of the August school opening.

Following the results of Monday’s meeting, Tan will write to the UP Board of Regents (BOR), the highest decision-making body in the university, to seek approval and authority to implement the change in the academic calendar.

The BOR is expected to take up the matter in a meeting on March 27.

De Vera said this process was also observed by the chancellors of seven other constituent universities who had approved the shift—UP Manila, UP Los Baños, UP Baguio, UP Visayas, UP Mindanao, UP Open University and the UP College in Cebu.

“The BOR approved the shift in those constituent universities on a pilot basis, meaning, all possible problems with the schedule in each constituent university must be threshed out by the next school year in 2015,” the official explained.

This means that all UP academic units, save for its secondary education programs, will open its classes in August this year.

Under the new scheme, classes in UP campuses will open in August with the first semester ending in December. Classes for the second semester will resume in January and end in May while the “summer term” will be from June to July.

Once the BOR officially approves UP Diliman’s shift to the August-May schedule, it will be up to Tan and the executive council composed of college deans to formulate the new schedule.