1

The Burden of Being a National University

(Paper read at the UP System Conference, May 20-22 2009, Subic)

Randolf S. David
Professor, Dept. of Sociology
College of Social Sciences and Philosophy

Not only because we are a university heavily subsidized by

taxpayers’ money, but also because the public, in general, believes
rightly or wrongly that since we have produced in the last one
hundred years most of the nation’s leaders and achievers in various
fields -- we are asked to take responsibility for the kind of society we
have become.

No one perhaps has put this to us more sharply than one of our
centennial guest lecturers last year, SGV founder Washington SyCip,
who told us: “If UP has accurately claimed that during the past 62
years after we left the US umbrella, UP graduates have occupied the
presidential chair for 46 years, then may I ask you, ‘Why are we in
such a mess?’”1

Mr. SyCip might as well have asked the same question of the
Catholic Church, to which I assume the majority of the nation’s
presidents belong. But that would not be fair, just as it is not fair to
make UP answerable for the mess created by a few of its alumni who
had the fortune to be elected the nation’s president. For, no single
institution can be held responsible for what individuals do or fail to do
after they have passed its portals.

Yet, Mr. SyCip can hardly be faulted for articulating a thought that
does make a lot of sense at first blush. If indeed we take pride in
being the school that produces the nation’s presidents, then why is
the country in such a mess? We cannot claim too much credit for the
achievements of our graduates, and not also assume the
accompanying responsibility for the problems they create.

But, having said this, it is important for us to bear in mind that our
people only have a vague idea of what we do as a university, how we
function as an academic community, and, most of all, how we
 2

understand our work. The public consciousness harbors certain

expectations, usually inflated, about the kind of graduates we should
be producing – expectations that are not always in accord with our
concept of what an educated person should be, or expectations that,
though we may agree with them, we are not always in a position to
meet. Our graduates, for example, are expected to top all the
national examinations, and, at the same time, to be actively involved
in the affairs of the nation -- to be not only the best in their respective
fields, but also to be socially aware and engaged. This immediately
poses certain practical questions for us: For example, should we
preoccupy ourselves with the training of potential bar topnotchers, or
should we dismiss this goal and focus instead on “the teaching of the
law in the grand manner”?

We in the faculty are burdened by more or less the same

expectations. A UP professor is not only expected to teach well, but
also to serve as the mind, the conscience, and the heart of the nation.
Yet, at the same time, we are not permitted to grumble too much
about poor learning conditions and low pay. Doing so is seen as
demeaning if not unpatriotic. We are constantly reminded that we are
in this great institution to serve our country and not ourselves. That
teaching in UP is a vocation, not a source of livelihood. In many
ways, we who work here have adopted these public expectations as
our own, and we have often tried to reflect these in our own
understanding of our institutional functions.

These hopes are however largely unexamined, and recurrent

judgments that we have failed to meet them have given rise to a
rhetoric of anxiety that dominates institutional reflection and reform.

As our society moves in the direction of modernity -- i.e., in the

direction of greater functional differentiation -- there is an urgent need
for us to re-think and maybe re-draw the space we occupy so that our
resources are not spread so thinly, and our chances of excelling in a
few well-chosen fields of endeavor, and thus of serving the needs of
an increasingly complex Philippine society, are greatly enhanced.

As we mark our one hundred years of existence, we not only look

back upon our institutional origins and transformation over the last
century, we are also, prompted to think about the future. I have
 3

always believed that of all the institutions in society, it is the university

that has a special affinity with the future. Our wish to remain relevant
to our society and to the larger world of learning, of which we are no
less a part, obliges us to review what we have become in the light of
our understanding of what a university is supposed to be, to reinvent
ourselves if necessary, and to do what we must in order that we may
continue to play an important role in our society and in our times.

Occasions for institutional reflection like the recent centennial

lectures, or like this conference, are important. An insight from
cognitive biology tells us that living systems that have secured their
existential conditions in their environment tend to develop better
cognitive abilities. The last century has shown that UP has not only
survived, but indeed it has thrived in the society that gave birth to it.
If our survival as a university were constantly threatened, we would
perhaps be on our toes all the time, performing only the essential
rational-instrumental tasks expected of any school. I doubt if we
would have the time to pause, to reflect, and to hold conferences.
But, of course, a greater capacity to see or to observe ourselves does
not always guarantee optimum adaptation to our environment, which
itself is also becoming more complex.

In my contribution to the centennial lecture series2, I argued that, like

living systems, the University of the Philippines, has evolved from its
beginnings to become an autopoietic or self-creating system. This
evolution – meaning, its gradual differentiation from its environment,
coupled with its own internal differentiation, is what has given it long-
term viability in an increasingly complex environment.

In broad strokes, I tried to illustrate the evolutionary process that UP

has undergone. I painted a picture of the UP as an institution that was
founded to serve colonial ends. Yet, in just a short time, it turned into
a bastion of anti-colonial ideas. Defying a surrounding culture that
was profoundly religious, UP instantly became the center of an
assertive secularism. Throughout the last century, UP took for
granted its entitlement to State subsidy, but it never hesitated to bite
the hand that fed it when provoked. Its ideological inclination has
always been anti-Establishment. Even as it produces graduates that
can fit into the existing social order, it openly bids them to go against
the tide. “Tatak UP” is how we call it – a term that recalls non-
 4

conformism, idealism, and the habit of criticism. This commitment to

subversiveness is palpable in every corner of this institution, a fact
that perhaps makes the legislators who approve our budget every
year ask why they continue to fund a school that specializes in the
training of the system’s grave-diggers. Yet, on the whole, Philippine
society has tolerated our claim to autonomy, treating it as an
institutional idiosyncrasy, a small price to pay for the overall
excellence of its product.

It is not to say we are not called to account for what we do or fail to

do. Yes, as Washington SyCip tells us, we are. We’re endlessly
heckled when we don’t land among the top universities in the world or
in the Asian region. We find ourselves torn between playing the
game of catch-up in order to improve our survey ranking, and
refusing to participate in these surveys altogether because we do not
agree with the criteria they use to measure a university’s worth.

I personally think that, important as they are, we cannot allow

ourselves to be too distracted by these ranking systems. If a
university had to respond to every challenge from its environment,
this would lead, the sociologist Niklas Luhmann3 writes, to a system
“demanding more of itself than it could possibly achieve
operationally.” This is so, he adds, “because given the complexity of
the environment, the system does not have the ‘requisitive variety.’”
What must be ensured, first of all, he says, is “that the environment
tolerates the autopoiesis of the system.”

This means, for the university, that it is seen as performing its work
better than any possible alternative at a given moment, and that in so
doing, it solves a key problem for the larger society of which it is a
part. For a university, that problem basically revolves around the
production, acquisition, and transfer of useful knowledge. To put it
bluntly: We hold the franchise on knowledge in our society – we
certify what constitutes worthwhile knowledge, who is qualified to
teach it or to learn it, how, and who gets to be called an educated
person. Instruction and research are our basic operations; and our
function, as the highest rung in the educational system, is to prepare
Filipinos to live in future social systems.
 5

But, these, as we know, are not all that a premier university does. A
university is also expected to play a part in the social division of labor.
The substance of this role may vary from country to country. But in
the main, it is expressed in the kind of knowledge that is regarded as
relevant, in the expectation that a great university’s graduates must
also be leaders and therefore must be politically conscious and
equipped with leadership qualities, and in the direct part that the
university is expected to play in the cultural development of the
nation. We often regard these desiderata as subordinate to our
principal tasks as producer and transmitter of knowledge. Yet, they
tend to overshadow the importance of teaching and research in the
public reckoning of a university’s performance in relation to the
nation’s life. Indeed, we may say: we purchase our academic
freedom -- the freedom to do research on any subject we choose and
to teach without any external constraint -- by the degree to which we
are able to demonstrate our usefulness to society. And that
usefulness is rarely measured by the Filipino public in terms of the
number of people we graduate or the number of articles we publish in
peer-reviewed journals. We are permitted to be self-governing, like
no other institution of higher learning in this country. But, in return,
the nation that pays our expenses constantly expects us to show that
we deserve this autonomy.

It is difficult enough to be a university in the modern sense, going by

the criteria that are used to gauge whether an institution of higher
learning may be regarded as “world-class” or not.4 It is even harder
to imagine what compound expectations accompany the new label
we have assigned ourselves as “the national university.”5

This nomenclature suggests to me not just recognition but an explicit

affirmation of the direct linkage between the university’s mission and
the nation’s future. As I understand it, no longer must we be content
to reckon our role in terms of our usual teaching and research
functions. More than this, we are taking upon ourselves a role that
traditional universities never needed to assume – and that is, to serve
not only as the vanguard of the nation’s consciousness, but also the
spearhead of its transition to a fully modern society.

How might we respond to this challenge?

 6

A. First of all, I think it is crucial for us not to forget that we cannot

aspire to be the national university if we do not secure our status as a
university in the first instance. Instruction and research – the
creation, acquisition, adaptation, and transmission of useful
knowledge are our basic tasks. If we don’t do them well, we lose our
credibility and stature as a center of learning in the world of
knowledge.

We have so far remained basically a teaching university, yet we

cannot ignore the fact that all over the world, the great universities
are prioritizing the creation and application of new knowledge,
relegating instruction increasingly to a notch below research. We
have to bear this in mind, even as we know that UP cannot at this
point subordinate its teaching function to research.

Insofar as our basic tasks are concerned, there are at least two things
we might consider doing:

(1) Research: Even as we cannot compete on equal terms with the

rich universities in the world in the conduct of basic and path-breaking
research, we can, using the tools of our disciplines, focus on the
various realities of our country, analytically sorting out their nature
and the problems they pose, and drawing out their policy or problem-
solving implications. There is a broad range of topics, the subject of
many commentaries and opinions, still awaiting the expert views of
specialists from UP – mass poverty, hunger, human rights violations,
the communist insurgency, war in Mindanao, corruption,
dysfunctional elections, urban congestion, human trafficking, drug
addiction, racial and ethnic conflict, and the state of Philippine
education itself, etc. We can also address the global problems of our
time – climate change, pandemics, financial crises, religious and
cultural conflicts, threats to biodiversity, global migration, etc. – by
examining their concrete manifestations and implications for a
country like ours, again using the observational and analytical tools of
our disciplines. We need to complement the initiative of the solitary
scholar or public intellectual by encouraging and supporting
departmental research programs, and by organizing analytical
working groups on such topics across disciplines. Graduate training
must go hand in hand with research programs.
 7

(2) Instruction: Undergraduate training still takes up the bulk of our

faculty time and facilities. There are political, historical, and structural
reasons for this. Our undergraduate programs are good and much
sought-after, and democratizing access to them is a continuing
affirmative effort on our part. Today, however, many colleges, both
public and private, are offering the same undergraduate programs.
Yet only a few universities have the capability to offer graduate
training. We have to seriously think of expanding our graduate
programs beyond their present levels, until at least the number of our
graduate students is as big as our undergraduate enrollment, if not
bigger. We must endeavor to train the teachers and administrators of
the country’s educational system. We must try to enrich the content
of our curricula and teaching materials by providing equal space to
local applications, publications, and research findings. We need to
embark on a large-scale program to produce textbooks, teaching
materials, and programs of instruction, to be used not just by our own
students by the rest of the nation’s colleges and universities. All this
cannot happen without an aggressive push for research, creative
reflection, and writing.

These are preliminary thoughts, and I am fully aware I am entering

contested territory. I intend them as starting points for discussion.
They are by no means exhaustive. But they mirror the kind of shift
that I personally think is worth pursuing.

B. Secondly, allow me now to move to the other tasks that, as I said

earlier, we typically regard as auxiliary to our main function as a
university, but whose centrality to the university’s need to establish its
presence in the society we cannot ignore. To the extent we are able
to serve these functions, we, as the national university, thereby earn
the right to govern ourselves and set our own directions. That’s how
important they are.

For want of a better way of designating them, I shall refer to them as:

(1) The task of raising the quality of public discourse, and

(2) The task of forming our students as the future leaders of the
nation.

(1) Raising the quality of public discourse.

 8

Universities like UP are uniquely positioned to intervene in the

ongoing public discussion of issues and problems. This is a terrain
that tends to be dominated by politicians, social activists, church
people, mass media commentators, and opinion writers. Each one of
these players represents a perspective, a way of framing, speaking or
understanding, a given topic. When the media turn to a professor for
his or her views on a topic, however, they do not expect just any type
of opinion but a specialist’s opinion that is informed by the disciplines
in which he/she operates. There will be times when we may have no
basis to give an expert opinion, but an interviewer may nonetheless
press us to speak as a sociologist, economist, linguist, biologist,
geologist, or physicist. Under such circumstances, if the statements
we give do not proceed from what we know as specialists, then it
behooves us to make clear that we are speaking as lay citizens rather
than as scholars. To pretend otherwise – i.e. to lend the authority of
our institutional or disciplinal affiliation to the plain opinions we hold
as members of a society is to risk undermining the authority of our
disciplines, and indeed, of the university we represent.

Certainly, the problem that our people face with regard to information
cannot be underestimated. The exponential growth in the capacity of
the mass media to bring a broad range of issues into the realm of
public discourse has not been matched by an increase in the high-
mindedness of public discussions. This is a social need that the
university, especially one that calls itself the national university, must
attempt to systematically address. Again, I quote from Washington
SyCip’s lecture: “Can UP encourage its bright faculty to publish
objective position papers on national issues that will stop the endless
and confusing debates that are in full page ads in the daily
newspapers?” This one is a fair challenge. And I dare say, of course
we can and we should, even if there is no assurance at the beginning
that when UP speaks, anyone will listen or that the debate will end.

Units like the School of Economics and the College of Law have
occasionally intervened in ongoing public discussions, with clear
position papers or “white papers” that frame the issues according to
the vision of their respective disciplines. They have enriched public
debate as a result. But, in the main, such interventions have been
the result of the individual initiatives of the faculty, rather than of any
 9

sustained institutional effort. It should not be difficult for us, with

commensurate support and encouragement from the university
administration, to form working groups on a variety of public issues.
Our interventions need not be couched in the language of advocacy –
it is enough that they offer conceptual clarity, critique, and concrete
proposals for finding solutions to problems. Such think pieces need
not always be based on new research either; they could be syntheses
of existing studies and data, new interpretations that can bring out the
blind spots of current analysis.

Such contributions are vastly different from the statements that

sometimes we are called upon to issue from our university councils.
The latter are manifestos that too often are not so different from those
issued by other sectors of the public. They are prominently reported
in the media only because they come from UP, not always because
they spell any substantive difference in the way the issues are framed
or analyzed. These statements may often become crucial elements
in the political equation, but they do not enrich the public
consciousness. The mandate we have earned for ourselves as a
subsystem of society is not so much for us to take sides in the conflict
of partisan interests as to be arbiters of what constitutes knowledge in
our time, of what is true and what is false, and of what can be claimed
as a rational idea or course of action. But, we are not precluded from
drawing conclusions that are politically consequential. It is important,
however, that as we perform this task, we need to remind ourselves
that political strife, even if we cannot entirely shield ourselves from it,
is not the business of the university. Knowledge is. Reason is.

These analytical papers need not always carry UP’s institutional seal.
It is enough that they are issued from our premises, as a direct result
of our work as academics. They can be the contribution of solitary
authors, or they can be the joint work of a group of authors belonging
to a department or college. Or they can be the in-house analyses of
any of our research institutes. No less important than writing these is
getting them into the circuit of public discourse – by way of symposia,
press conferences, media interviews, television appearances, and
articles in the popular media. We could aspire to do this until we
reach a point when, as far as the public is concerned, no issue is
considered closed until UP has spoken.
 10

It is of course very tempting to short-circuit this whole process by

issuing statements on every conceivable issue – statements that are
not explicitly informed by our unique position as a center of learning --
banking merely on our institutional prestige in order to be heard. This
is a scandalous waste of intellectual capital that ultimately can only
weaken our claim to being a university.

2. Forming our students as the future leaders of the nation

We love to say that every UP graduate is more than just a college-

degree holder. He/she is, above all, a leader with a clear sense of
purpose, a profound awareness of the basic problems of the country
and of the world, and a passionate commitment to the national good.
I still believe that, in general, this is true, although that is no reason to
place upon the shoulders of UP graduates the entire weight of the
Filipino nation’s past and future.

Our students come to us as young adults already equipped with basic

ideas of right and wrong. The values of their families and of the
communities in which they are raised are already impressed on their
character when they enter UP. We hold them for an average of 4 to 5
years – or, in some courses, up to a maximum of 8 years. But the
public forgets that we do not run a monastery or a total institution that
regulates every aspect of a student’s existence. Indeed, on the
contrary, we make it a point that in the conduct of our evaluative
function as a learning institution, we turn a blind eye on a student’s
family background, religion, politics, social class or ethnicity.

And so, during the period they are with us, our students remain open
to a variety of other influences – the mass media, their families, their
churches, their political organizations, their friends, and what they see
in the larger society outside. We are not even supposed to poke our
nose into any of these influences, except when they interfere with the
business of learning itself. We may suggest or offer advise, but we
cannot and do not command the loyalties of our students.

Still, we make sure our students pick up some important values while
they are with us, notably those associated with the General Education
Program: love of country, social justice, solidarity, the need to think
for oneself, rational argument, critical inquiry, thirst for knowledge,
 11

etc. We also help them acquire what Habermas6 has called “extra-
functional” abilities that equip them for leadership positions in their
chosen professions – “attributes and attitudes that are not contained
per se in professional knowledge and skills.” None of these, as we
know, are taught or professed in any programmatic way as in, say, a
grade school values or morality subject. Rather, they are acquired in
the course of their stay in the university community. We can only
create the conditions that multiply the occasions in which such values
may be imbibed. A university is not in the business of preaching
morality, if by that is meant instruction in a single unified moral code
that can provide an adequate distinction of good and evil for every
conceivable context. Allow me to elaborate this point so that it is not
misunderstood.

In a modern differentiated society, where various function systems

operate on the basis of their separate codes, a student may be taught
the ethics applicable to a given system – be this law, politics,
business, science, medicine, art, education, or mass media. But
what is regarded as good in one system will not always correspond to
what is desirable in another. This is to be expected, especially in a
modern society. Among the things we teach our students is precisely
that they must learn to differentiate – e.g. that what is good for their
family is not always good for the country, that what is profitable is not
always legal, that what is legal may not always be moral, etc. I have
always believed, in this regard, that the so-called moral crisis gripping
our country today is not due to Filipinos’ lack of any moral sense, or a
weakness in their values. The crisis stems rather from a recurrent
conflict of values – the tendency to apply moral notions drawn from
one system to other systems where they are not appropriate. This is
a problem that is particularly troublesome in societies undergoing the
transition from tradition to modernity. Much of what we call corruption
stems precisely from a failure to differentiate the multiple dimensions
of human activity.

For UP to take on the responsibility for the moral education of its

students – beyond the ethical norms that are specific to function
systems – is to assume, in the first instance, the existence of a moral
consensus in society. I think it will tie down the university in an
endless and ultimately futile search for moral universals that, if they
 12

are not bare injunctions without much instructive significance, are

bound to be very contentious.

Having said this, I do very much subscribe to the idea that a

university, especially the national university, the premier university of
a country, has a special role to play in the formation of its students’
political consciousness. I do not understand this in the narrow sense
of being committed to any ideology, whether left or right. I mean it
rather in the broad sense of being profoundly aware of the social
realities we confront today as a nation in a complex globalized world.
I mean it too in the philosophical sense of being able to see oneself
and one’s life as tightly intertwined with the fate of one’s society.

At this present stage in country’s development, we cannot pretend as

if our role is just to teach and do research. Bearing in mind where our
country is today, that would be unconscionably ivory-towerish. A
devastated Germany bent on rapid reconstruction faced the same
question right after the end of the Second World War. Jurgen
Habermas asked: “Can and should the university today restrict itself
to what appears to be the only socially necessary function and at best
institutionalize what remains of the traditional cultivation of personality
as a separate educational subject divorced from the enterprise of
knowledge?”7 He strongly argued against this illusion. Today, many
of our universities find themselves irresistibly pulled by the magnet of
economic processes, and, as a result, restrict their functions solely to
the production and transmission of technically exploitable knowledge.

It would be disastrous for our country if we followed this path.

Whether we like it or not, our graduates, more than the graduates of
any other tertiary school in the country, are today called upon to lead
the nation through these difficult times -- to inspire our people by their
example, to personify the heroic ideals of public service, and to
commit themselves to the unfinished task of building the nation. But
let me say again --these are not functions traditionally associated with
a university. At the beginning of this paper, I precisely warned
against the tendency of institutions to resonate every perturbation in
their environment, which they may not have the requisite complexity
to handle. But there seems no way for us to ignore some of these
perturbations. By the contingencies of its unique development as a
center of higher learning, UP has found itself cast in this difficult role
 13

– a role it cannot abdicate without undermining the long-term

prospects of the very society from which it draws its life.

To me, this is the biggest burden that being the national university of
our country has placed upon us. It is a reminder that we don’t just
train professionals, we produce the nation’s leaders – Filipinos who,
on top of what they must learn as professionals, are especially
educated to become familiar with the nation’s history, to identify with
its aspirations, to take on its manifold problems as their personal
responsibility, to integrate commitment to the public good in
everything they do, and most of all, to chart the nation’s future. In
ordinary times, this undoubtedly is too much to ask of any student, no
matter how much public subsidy goes into his education.

But these are extraordinary times. Without wishing to sound

melodramatic, I want to say that in all the 42 years I have taught in
the university, I have never felt our society to be so distressed and so
confused as it is today. I believe it is our duty to communicate to our
students in no uncertain terms the nation’s cry for help. If it is
necessary to consecrate one whole generation of UP students to pull
the nation out of its present rut, we must do so in full awareness of
what we need to do and why we must do it now. We must tell our
students what is expected of them from the first day they set foot on
any of our campuses. They must, from day one, think of their stay in
UP as a rigorous preparation for a time when they must take in their
hands a good part of the levers of decision-making for the nation. To
think less than this is to be miscast in the wrong university.

What does this mean for the task of teaching? It means we don’t just
transmit knowledge. We form vocations for national service. That’s
what being a national university suggests – at the minimum.

How do we begin to organize ourselves, and the enterprise of

learning itself, to carry out this function?

There is no substitute, in the first instance, to the self-organization of

students. The university must actively provide the conditions in which
students can participate in the political discussions of the larger
society as a constitutive part of the learning process. This connotes
enormous responsibilities on the part of the university, and inevitably
 14

pits the institution against many parents and politicians who may seek
to confine the UP’s mission to the training of economically productive
but politically apathetic graduates.

Secondly, the university must realize that it cannot fulfill this function
if it starts phasing out departments and courses whose practical value
to national development is only indirect and cannot immediately be
demonstrated. I have in mind courses in history, literature, the
humanities, philosophy, and the social sciences whose survival has
been imperiled in universities abroad that are being rationalized as
profit-seeking corporations.

I have time for only two final points. The first has to do with the
further democratization of admissions. I would ask the university –
the national university – to consider expanding admissions from the
various provincial high schools, by identifying those high-caliber
public high schools to whose valedictorian and salutatorian graduates
we may offer automatic admission into UP. I will forever be grateful
that this policy existed at the time I entered UP in the Sixties, for I
was one of its beneficiaries. We need not compromise quality or
lower our assessment standards to accommodate such students. We
can offer learning assistance schemes, if needed, and tap some of
our bright students to help ease their transition to UP’s rigorous
system. I would also propose expanding scholarship programs aimed
explicitly at supporting the tuition and living costs of bright students
from the remote regions.

The second point has to do with the establishment of a modified

Pahinungod program. Every year, we can offer to our fresh
graduates the opportunity to work as volunteers for a minimum of one
year in a local government unit, or at any of the regional agencies of
the national government. We can tap the alumni and some
international organizations to fund a young blood civil servant
program. The UP will guarantee a monthly living allowance. The
objective is basically to motivate our graduates to acquire an early
stake in the solution of the nation’s persistent problems as civil
servants. We will encourage the participants to keep a journal of their
internship, and we will publish the best of these learning experiences.
 15

There are countless other things we can do, for which we have the
requisite structures, or which will not take away significant resources
from the main activities we are already pursuing. We have never
lacked imagination; our worst enemy has been pessimism. Some of
may think that many of the tasks I have enumerated here are none of
the business of a university. That would be true in an important
sense – if we stopped calling ourselves the National niversity of the
Philippines. The principal burden of being a national university is
precisely that we have to be -- for our country -- not just a source of
light, but a beacon of hope and commitment through many seasons
of despair.

----------oOo----------

Endnotes

1
Washington SyCip, “Questions for the future of U.P.,” Sept. 3, 2008
2
Randolf S. David, “Modernity and the University”, August 29, 2008
3
Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media. Stanford University Press, 1996. p. 96.
4
Jamil Salmi, The Challenge of Establishing World-Class Universities. The World Bank, 2009.
5
Congress of the Philippines, R.A. 9500, “An Act to Strengthen the University of the Philippines
as The National University”, April 29, 2008.
6
Jurgen Habermas, “The University in a Democracy” in Toward a Rational Society, Beacon
Press, 1970, p. 2.
7
Ibid., p. 4