A fairer price to pay
December 11, 2006 | 12:00am
A recent visit to San Diego – to give a lecture on literature and politics in the Philippines before a crowd composed mainly of Filipino-Americans at the University of California, San Diego – produced some pleasurable discoveries, thanks to the generosity of our host, Mrs. Julie Hill, an old Manila hand who has since retired to a pretty bungalow in Rancho Sta. Fe.
Among the highlights of that weekend sortie was a performance of The Wiz at the La Jolla Playhouse – a theater founded in 1947 by Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Mel Ferrer, and rebuilt in 1982 to be co-managed by UCSD’s Department of Theater and Dance. It was recently renovated again to include all manner of 21st-century theater technology, and the wizardry of the machinery proved more than appropriate – indeed, vital – to this latter-day interpretation of Frank L. Baum’s 1900 tale of a girl in Kansas and of the strange menagerie that forms around her on the journey down the Yellow Brick Road to the Land of Oz.
The Wizard of Oz has, of course, seen any number of versions and adaptations for screen and stage, most notably the 1939 hit starring Judy Garland and even a 2005 Muppets TV movie. The Wiz was a 1975 Broadway musical with an all-black cast, and was itself turned into a 1978 movie starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.
Directed by Tony Award winner Des McAnuff, the La Jolla production – which had at least two Filipinos in the cast, as far as I could tell from the production notes – was a dazzling, spirited, exhilarating sensory treat, the kind that made you want to get up from your seat and dance to the musical’s most popular tune, Ease on Down the Road, and warble along with Dorothy when she launched into The Wiz’s other showstopper, Home (you know that song: "When I think of home, I think of a place where there’s love overflowing…").
The production, I hear, is now bound for Broadway, where – good grief – it’ll command $150 tickets; I don’t have that kind of loose change, so I’m mighty glad we saw it in San Diego.
I’d been to San Diego a couple of times before – my sister Elaine and her husband Eddie used to live there – and it’s hard to imagine a more pleasant place to live in, presuming you can afford the real estate (now you know why Elaine and Eddie are in Virginia). San Diego’s combination of sun and sea are matchless, and the city has attractions galore for visitors of all persuasions, from the 15-museum cluster in Balboa Park and the windswept coves of La Jolla to the Spanish missions that dot the countryside (in one of these, in San Luis Rey, we found a santo with distinctly Chinese eyes that had been made in the Philippines in the 1600s). Beng’s favorite spot – an unexpected find – was a compound in Encinitas that turned out to be shrine to her guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, who lived there in the 1930s.
My own moment of awe occurred on a visit to the UCSD campus, where my host and former UP colleague, the bright young scholar Jody Blanco, took me on a tour of the many-faceted, glass-sided Geisel Library, from the top floor of which you could see in all directions of the compass, and on whose shelves probably stood enough stored knowledge to illuminate every little corner of the human condition. Students in shorts and jeans nonchalantly worked off laptops as ubiquitous as the spiral notebooks and slide rules of our undergraduate years. I had stumbled on a similar sight a month earlier at the University of Michigan – a hall the size of a basketball court, housing row upon row of computers open for student use 24/7.
This, I realized, was truly education in and for the 21st century, and as Jody and I left the library for my decidedly low-tech lecture in the adjoining building, I wondered how long it would be before my students in UP could enjoy such a plenitude of study aids.
With what I’m going to say next, I’ll probably lose half of my student readers and earn myself a few stinging denunciations in some corners of the blogosphere – no "love overflowing," here – but I can’t help wading into this debate over raising tuition fees at the University of the Philippines. And I’ll state my position outright: it’s about time UP did this, and it should be doing even more to raise extra revenues, even as it demands and deserves support from a government unlikely to meet all its needs.
I’ve been following this from a literal and figurative distance, so I might be missing out on some of the details of the arguments, although I’ve looked into position papers from both the administration and the student groups protesting the increase. But I think I can speak to the issue anyway as someone who’s been on both sides of it – as a student activist many years ago, and more recently as a university administrator.
The basic facts, as I appreciate them, are that the UP administration plans to raise tuition fees from the present P300 per unit to P1,000 in Diliman, bringing up full tuition from about P6,000 a semester to about P18,000. It’ll be the first such major increase for UP since 1989.
The administration says it needs the increase to help it cope with the university’s growing needs, which its annual budget just can’t meet, and that the increase, as large as it is, will most sharply affect those who can afford it, leaving the poorest of UP students untouched.
Some students – the UP Student Council chairman, among others – will have none of it, arguing from the position that UP students shouldn’t be paying any tuition at all – in other words, Filipinos have a right to a free college education.
This may sound like another one of those tempests in a teacup that our so-called Diliman Republic is famous for, but as the country’s premier state university, UP is every Filipino’s business. If you pay taxes, then you’re subsidizing UP and all its teachers, students, and staff; even if you’re too young or too poor to pay taxes, you can still get into UP if you’re smart and lucky enough, and partake of its benefits.
Is a 300 percent increase reasonable? Not unless you take a hard look at some other figures. Again, bear in mind that since 1989, full tuition at UP Diliman has cost students P300 per unit or less than P6,000 for an 18-unit semester.
By comparison, tuition at the Ateneo cost P2,200 per unit in 2004; at 18 units, that’s almost P40,000 per semester.
Just for the heck of it, let’s go even farther afield to those two US universities I visited. Tuition fees for California residents at UCSD were about $3,500 or P175,000 a semester this year, and $9,000 or P450,000 for non-residents. For Michigan, the comparable figures are P250,000 in-state and P750,000 out-of-state, per semester for 2007. Now of course we can argue that we can’t possibly compare UP to American universities and expect to pay as much as they do. (Although it boggles my mind to know that some Filipino parents are actually growing enough dollars in their backyards to send their kids overseas, and to even fancier schools.) But that’s true only up to a point, because if we want the same world-class education, then we’re going to have to buy the same books, the same computers, and so on, which will cost us the same if not more, saving basically on our poor professors’ salaries. In other words, we’ll eventually get what we pay for; native talent and resourcefulness can only go so far.
I have no doubt that there will be some families who will be hard-pressed to cough up the extra tuition – and for these families, I hope some form of assistance will continue to be available. That assistance can even come from the money earned from those who can afford to pay full tuition under UP’s socialized tuition scheme.
And there are clearly those who can and who will pay that much for whatever a UP education is still worth. Why shouldn’t UP charge them a fairer price for its services? Why should a state university – our best one, where slots are severely limited, and admission to which is already easier for those with superior high school backgrounds – subsidize the affluent?
It isn’t even just a question of money, but of mindset.
The position paper issued by a group called the "Kabataan Party" opposing the tuition fee increase points out – correctly – that this government has other, higher spending priorities than education. Now, we can cry, "We deserve to be fully subsidized! Cut the military budget!" until we’re blue in the face, and be politically correct in that position – but we might as well wait until the Second Coming before that happens, precisely because we know this administration isn’t going to heed that call.
To resist even reasonable tuition fee increases – or other internal means of improving university finances – is, in effect, to declare a hunger strike, to choose to starve in the vain hope that someone up there will take pity and give us what we deserve, against the entire history of state support for higher education in this country. Starving ourselves will merely play into the hands of those who would be happy to see UP gutted from within, gutted because it can’t afford to keep its best teachers nor to upgrade its facilities, too weak to make a difference where it counts – in the production of intellectual capital to serve the Filipino people.
A university that leaves itself at the mercy of an indifferent government for its finances is courting dependence, not independence.
Quezon Hall’s an easy target, but it’s the wrong one: march on Congress and Malacañang – they’re the ones who decide how much UP and the other state universities and colleges get. They’re the ones who keep creating new SUCs without adequate funding, just to make some local politicians look good. What we need to do, if we’re all so worked up about greater government support for education, is to militate for a national leadership and for people in government who will make this happen.
Who really wants tuition fee increases, or tuition fees for that matter? Nobody. Who wants to pay taxes? Nobody. Who wants to pay the electric and the water company? Nobody. But there’s literally a price to pay for these utilities, and for social services like education. For those who can’t afford to pay it, let’s seek subsidies and generate scholarships; for those who can, let’s take their money, spread it around, and put it to good use.
If you have better, more practical ideas, I’d be glad to hear them – and I have a feeling I will.
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