IT SEEMS that the quality of education in the Faculty of Arts and Letters has deteriorated. This can be gleaned from the rather thinning quality of the faculty profile and the deteriorating facility. The latter is particularly acute since there has really been no major capital expenditure in the past several years to put up even a decent new lecture hall for the college’s big population.
Arts and Letters has several programs, some of them with technical requirements, such as Communication Arts (CA) and Journalism, which are two of the biggest programs. But CA does not even have a TV or radio soundbooth; it loans from Educational Technology Center. Journalism does not have a newsroom.
We Journalism students sometimes hold classes in Room D, which has low ceiling (above is a mezzanine used by Commerce students) and is not multimedia-equipped. CA and Journalism do not have an audio-visual room (AVR). The college has long given up its own AVR to Edtech.
Up to now, many Journalism students still have to hold classes or view films at the Artlets AVR. Some of them don’t even know what the AVR looks like. They don’t know since when they try to schedule events at the AVR, the slots are already taken. That’s according to Edtech.
Journalism and CA belong to a department known as “Department of Media Studies.” The name is very apt since that’s about what students can do since there are hardly any media facilities. They just do “studies.”
Journalism and CA are media programs sans media equipment. They don’t even have an AVR.
Perhaps the deteriorating quality of education in Arts and Letters is reflected in the quality of student scholarship and leadership.
When one compares the alumni of Artlets with those of the original Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (Philets), one is bound to be dismayed. Philets alumni are leaders in their respective fields. They are National Artists, Ramon Magsaysay laureates, Philippine Centennial awardees, and the top thinkers, writers, journalists and media practitioners of the country.
Artlets have their own illustrious alumni, of course. But the little they have may not be sustained because of what appears to be the deteriorating quality of student scholarship and leadership.
But still, Artlets seems impervious to its decline. The Artlets Student Council (ABSC) in fact holds annually the Mr. and Ms. Ideal Artlets Personality, a beauty contest. What Artlets lacks for brains, it seems, it makes up for by vanity.
But even the simple business of holding a beauty contest, Artlets student leadership seems wanting. It seems it doesn’t even know how to count.
In the last beauty contest, some of the judges walked out– and along with them the parents and supporters of the candidates who had been eliminated–after the top finalists were named. It seems that the finalists were not in the judges’ scorecards.
What happened?
It appears that the judges were not informed that there were a series of pre-judgings and the scores from these were included in the tabulation of the finalists. Despite the walkout of some of the judges, the contest continued. It seems that some judges had been in the know about the mechanics of tabulation.
But when the Varsitarian tried to check out the incident, the ABSC refused to cooperate.
We asked Chistian Valeroso, the president of ABSC, for an interview and to show us a copy of the controversial scoring sheets.
We religiously followed up our request for three weeks, but to no avail. He then referred us to his vice-president-internal, Nina Kristine Hilario.
In what should be a gauge of the independence of the student government in Artlets, Hilario told us that she would need the authority of the ABSC advisers, the board of judges and the Student Welfare and Development Board before she could show us the document.
You would think she would herself get the authorization that she deemed necessary. But no. The Varsitarian had to get the authorization. And when the authorization was duly signed and we presented it to her, Hilario acceded to the interview and set it the following week. Come interview day, she said she would not answer any question pertaining to the beauty contest, She did not hand us the scoring sheets.
Such is an example of the deteriorating quality of student scholarship and leadership in Artlets. Her refusal to cooperate is a reflection of the quality of transparency of student governance in Artlets.
