How to Grow a University?

Start small. This is especially sage advice if you have no choice; if you are, for instance, in the government of one of the poorest and most neglected provinces in the country, if the year is 1972–not exactly a good year politically–and there just doesn’t seem to be any money for things like education.

So you start small. You take 101 students, 12 teachers, four classrooms borrowed from the local high school, a rented room for a library, with all of 627 volumes, an administration housed in a suite in a local hotel, a "staggering" budget of half a million pesos and just enough political support to put through a congressional bill– and you start a school. You call it Palawan Teachers College.

And it thrives.

Thirty years later it has every reason to celebrate. It has evolved from Teachers College to State College to State University–the first in Region IV–and it now has over 8,000 students, over 300 faculty members and more than a hundred on staff, 23 undergraduate programs, including Petroleum Engineering, the only such program in the country, a Law School, nine other graduate programs and 12 non-degree courses. It also has seven provincial centers for education outside Puerto Princesa, from Coron in the north to Quezon in the south and Cuyo in the east. It is a Center for Excellence in Education and a regional center for Filipino (Panrehiyong Sentro ng Wika). Its beautiful campus is graced with myriad flame trees in April and May; it has a plant nursery, an orchidarium and a butterfly garden. The Marine Sciences Department raises bangus and samaral and cultured pearls.

Palawan State University celebrated its 30th anniversary yesterday. Only two of the "old-timers", members of the original faculty, have been with the school non-stop since the start: Dr. Violeta Yadao of Midwifery and Dr. Minda Aquino of Botany and Tissue Culture. Dr. Lillian Byron, who handles university research, was also there at the start, although she devoted some years to other concerns. Dr. Teresita L. Salva, president of the University, is also considered "home grown", even though she too spent some years away: she started with the original Math faculty.

And she has seen the school develop. In its early days as a teachers’ college under founding president Dr. Walfrido Ponce de Leon, the thrust was in education, in an attempt to train competent teachers to raise the level of education in this still "undiscovered" province. But as the province developed, so did the need for other forms of educational expertise–in business and entrepreneurship, fisheries, scientific and technical fields.

Thus in 1984, on the urging of Atty. Teddy Peña, a Palaweño then with the Ministry of Natural Resources, President Marcos signed a bill mandating the move up from Teachers College to State College. Dr. Heracleo D. Lagrada became president in 1985, only to give way a year later, as part of the national upheaval that accompanied the end of the Marcos regime, to Prof. Paterno M. Bruselas.

Dr. Salva’s first term as president was from 1991 to 1993, during which she instituted the Law School under its first dean, Atty. Peña. Dr. Salva also began working for university status for the school, but this was to be realized only under the next president, Dr. Crispiniano R. Acosta–and then only after Congressmen Alfredo E. Abueg and David A. Ponce de Leon managed to "corner" President Fidel Ramos, on a visit to Palawan, urging him to declare the bill they had sponsored a priority.

"These," explains one administrator, "were the days when everyone wanted to open a little school named for his or her father, and get it declared a state university. Congress was swamped with such requests! But this was on the provincial level."

So the school became a state university–PSU–in 1994, and a year later got involved in an interesting new degree program in Petroleum Engineering, in consortium with the Robert Gordon University of Aberdeen, Scotland. This is a unique program, the only one in the country, and was designed in response to the discovery of natural gas and oil in Malampaya. PSU also offers courses in Oil Exploration, so it is helping to train the personnel needed for the Malampaya project. It has also opened up some livelihood programs in the gas- and oil-rich area.

PSU started with a small campus area in town, the Manalo campus, now given over for the most part to the laboratory elementary school and the newly-constructed law school, although a few university classes still meet there. The main campus is now in Tiniguiban, near the City Hall of Puerto Princesa, a good 15-minute drive from the center of town, but public transportation will still take you there for the minimum fare of P4.00.

When the Tiniguiban campus was new, faculty and students were forced to plod through the mud or, in summer, down the long dusty road, to get there. Today there are no such problems, as jeeps and tricycles bring students to the new gate, installed on the 25th anniversary. From there it is easy to walk around the main parts of the campus: the College of Arts and Humanities is first, and then Education, with the canteen right across the street, and then Business Administration. At that point the road winds around and starts down to Puerto Bay, where the marine biologists carry on, feeding vegetable scraps –cabbage and such, refuse from the local market–to the samaral, to make them stronger, tastier and faster to reproduce.

The president’s house is nestled down by the bay; it is a simple structure, but the garden is bright and beautiful, and said to be tended by Dr. Salva herself. She has inspiring models– the orchidarium is right next door, filled with orchids of all colors, from orange to tan to pink to purple to white. Then comes a small butterfly garden, screened in, of course, and also full of color. The Administration Building, set up on a hill, looks down on this whole "biodiversity region". The road continues to circle around from there, and then you are back at the gate.

PSU’s mission is to provide quality education to the people of Puerto Princesa. But once it got comfortable and established, there was a move to reach out further still, to bring educational opportunities to people in the smaller towns of the province, students who couldn’t afford to leave home and go and live in the "big city" in order to study. So a series of educational centers was established through-out the province, under the College of Community Resources Development, and these centers are set up to do just that –i.e. develop the resources of the community, especially the brain-power resources.

There are centers now in Coron, Taytay, Cuyo, Roxas, Araceli, Brooke’s Point, Rizal and Quezon, all supervised by PSU under Dean Nita Socrates, but funded and supported by Local Government Units, with supplements provided by PTA groups when necessary. These centers all followed the same "start small" dictum, beginning with only two-year programs and then channeling students into the main campus in Puerto. But now they are all quickly moving into four-year programs.

Faced with the challenge of what to do when government support for national universities falls off (scheduled for 2005), PSU has come up with some innovative new programs that serve the triple purpose of income generation, community development and education, and hands-on lab facilities to supplement university programs.

One such program, a deep sea fish corral in Taytay, is already operative, generating P85,000 net in its first two months of operation. Dr. Edgar Castillo, Director of the University’s Special Programs, explains that while the Taytay fish corral is earning hard cash for the university, it also serves as a lab for marine biology and fisheries students, and students of entrepreneurship. And it helps educate the community on responsible fishing practices, relying as it does on "volunteer" fish (which just swim into the pens, to be harvested on a selective basis) rather than using either cyanide or dynamite, both of which destroy coral reefs and threaten fish resources.

There are also plans for small tourist hotels in both Coron and on the Tiniguiban campus, to serve as labs for entrepreneurship and tourism and hotel management and, again, to earn for the university.

Palawan has a very mixed population, which includes Muslims, Christians both Catholic and Protestant, a very significant group of Seventh Day Adventists, and even a good-sized Vietnamese community. (Puerto used to host a unhcr first-asylum camp.) All groups are served by the university, and all groups serve as well, providing a most lively student body and pushing the university again and again beyond its original limits. The 30th anniversary is being celebrated with the theme of "Progressive Strategies for Unity in Diversity", and this is surely a boast the university has lived up to. Let us see where the next 30 years will take it.