There is a maxim that goes, “Universities are a microcosm of society.” It is a statement so bold that it calls for educational institutions to instill a sense of community, democracy, leadership, and harmony among its stakeholders.
That’s the reason why the University Student Government (USG) decided to change its constitution into one that emulates the Philippine Government—broadening the breadth of roles and powers, and enlarging the seats to covet for student leaders.
While revising the constitution was imminent due to past failures, mirroring a dysfunctional national government rather puts the student government in the pits of slowed-down progress in their decision-making, and instead hampered their openness, efficiency, and diluted the whole point of serving the studentry.
As such, in one university student senate hearing that the press attended pertaining about the quotation of the Commission on Financial Audit for business documents to be used by student institutions, the processes were so bureaucratic that a meeting was called by the senators only to agree on a resolution that they would be inviting additional resource speakers for their next meeting.
“Yes, it would be far easier if we [had] actually invited them now, but if we actually invited them now, it may have clashed on some of the queries or concerns of the other [senators] during the session… For the Senate, it is very important to know or to decide who would [be in] the Senate Sessions or who would be the ones who would also be joining to speak out in our sessions for a much more formal setting,” said Imma Rose Pangilinan, Senate President.
Such decisions could have been agreed upon through written correspondence among the senators, but instead, for the sake of upholding a “formal setting” that follows formal parliamentary procedures, processes become unnecessarily stretched—slowing down matters needing imminent resolutions rather than expediting them.
Moreover, the additional layers of bureaucracy and decentralizing USG operations lead to our own student leaders, particularly the executive branch, to be put in silo with what is happening in the other branches of the new government.
“Due to the separation of powers in the new constitution, the [University Student Council’s] press secretary is not the press secretary of the High Court and the Senate,” said USC President Emmanuel Manalastas when interviewed about the reason why the student senators have not been announced by the council to the press.
The new constitution has also greatly expanded the roles of USG branches to a point where a lot of positions reside in gray areas.
One example is the establishment of the High Court within the student government, which the constitution says has the ability to open cases on its own initiatives. Such a rule stands on an ambiguous ground that there is no clear elucidation on what specific “cases” the high court can open—one lapse in the constitution aside from the lack of elucidation on the due process that the student court will follow.
Alongside this, additional seats for solicitors-general are put into place. Unlike their national counterparts, the functions of student solicitors-general are different—instead of representing the government in court proceedings, the solicitors-general in the context of the university focus on student concerns on academics, facilities, and equipment.
There are many seats—both elected and appointed—that have been established, but they fail to consider the previous challenges in student leadership at our university. In the past, with only 24 senatorial seats and three head positions, the council already struggled to fill these roles. Now, with the addition of new positions such as directors, senators, and solicitors-general, the challenge of filling these roles has become more significant.
Such cases show that to change a set of policies into one that mirrors an ineffective government holds more peril than to improve the flow of work of student leaders in their service.
There is nothing wrong in changing a set of rules, a constitution, especially when existing policies become obsolete and unresponsive to the current needs and challenges of our community.
However, change must be for the better. It should always drive progress, and improvement—and not a step that leads us to ineffectiveness and inefficiency.
To revisit the mentioned maxim, universities being the microcosms of society does not mean to mimic all aspects of the larger society. Rather, it calls for universities to take only the best practices, and instill among up-and-rising leaders the need to rectify first through themselves their own policies that reflect those that need to also be fixed in the broader society.
In the case of the USG, this means streamlining processes that will better serve the student body. While the constitution is already there, what is imperative now is to deviate from an overkill of bureaucracy that makes each student leader out-of-touch with each other.
Doing such will transform a student government defined by procedural inefficiencies into one that maximizes all roles and responsibilities with not only effectiveness but also efficiency—one that will truly uplift the whole Angelite studentry.
Godwin Pring is the editor-in-chief of The Angelite for the Publication Year 2024-2025, and writes opinions under the column “God ‘in the Masses.”
The views and opinion of the editor does not necessarily reflect those of the publication.
