(This article first appeared in the October 1996 issue of Universitas.)
Unlike childbirth, in which pain is experienced during active labor, the pains of giving birth to UA&P came after baptism.
When UA&P became a university last year, its structures and systems were still those of a think tank. This is especially true with the School of Economics (SEC) which, in essence, is the original Center for Research and Communication and can be considered as UA&P’s firstborn. Now SEC is being asked to transform itself into a school, and it has not been easy.
“The most significant difficulty in the old setup was that teaching was not given the importance it should have been given,” says Louie Molina, a faculty member of the SEC.
To address the issue, the SEC was restructured. SEC’s Operating Committee is now composed of the Dean (Dr. Bernardo Villegas), the Assistant Dean and Director for Research (Dr. Emil Antonio), and the Director for Academics (Dr. Peter Lee U).
The changes within SEC will clearly define the relationships within the school and the job expectations of an educational institution.
For instance, the Research Director heads the Institute for Economic Policy Research (IPR), now the only institute under the SEC. All the other institutes have been reconstituted into four teams in charge of researching and writing for the various SEC publications.
The Academic Director will, of course, be in charge of the academic programs, which include the Industrial Economics Program, the Applied Business Economics Program, and the Department of Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences. Respective program directors will still take care of their programs’ daily concerns as well as report to the academic director who sets down broad policies in teaching.
“All former research tutors are now part of the SEC faculty. We do not accept undergraduates in[to] the faculty,” says Mr. Molina.
With this new setup, the workload of the faculty has been clearly defined to suit the needs of the SEC.
“Every semester, each faculty member’s workload will consists of six units of research. Six units of teaching could three units of actual classroom teaching and three units of thesis advising or research seminar supervising. The six research units…mean one research paper per month, which could come out in a publication; and one long technical paper per year, which will be published under the Working Papers Series and hopefully can be published in academic journals so we can build our reputation,” says Mr. Molina.
Dr. Antonio add, “We’re trying to be a world-class, research-based university. And so the focus of restructuring is to highlight that particular characteristic of the University. Everyone in the faculty will be required to do world-class teaching and world-class research.”
Some difficulties are, of course, to be expected during the restructuring phase. The most evident example of this is the diminishing size of the school’s staff. As of October 1996, SEC staff has been whittled down to around 34 people, from some 55 people in the same period last year. Amid the confusion, however, there have been glimmers of clarity in discovering opportunities within or outside the University. In the end, the most important point clarified is the career path offered to those who want to be part of the University: from Instructor to Assistant Professor to Associate Professor to full Professor to University Professor.
“We have created room for those who love to do both [teaching and research]. We are beginning to accept applications from people with doctorates abroad who are getting attracted because the standards we are setting are world class,” says Dr. Antonio. “After all,” he adds, “we are building the University of Asia and the Pacific.”
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