MANILA, Philippines - The University of the Philippines (UP), the nation?s premier university, kicks off its centennial celebration today looking forward to the next 100 years, with Excellence, Service and Leadership as the key words in its vision for the future.

The UP, which started as a small institution of learning on Padre Faura Street in Manila in 1908, has grown tremendously in the last 100 years, and has become a university system with seven universities and 12 campuses all over the country. In 1911 it had only seven academic units, now it is offering 258 undergraduate and 438 graduate programs. Students come from almost all the 16 regions and all socio-economic brackets.

The UP has played a very important role in the social, economic and political development of the nation in the last 100 years. It produced seven out of 14 presidents, 12 chief justices of the Supreme Court, 30 out of 31 national scientists and 36 out of 57 national artists. Of the close to 250,000 UP alumni, 15,000 are doctors, 8,000 are lawyers and 23,000 are teachers.

The UP is a descendant of the ?universitas,? the 14th century scholastic guilds in Europe. The typical university then consisted of a college of liberal arts and sciences as well as graduate and professional schools having the authority to confer degrees in various fields of study.

In the beginning, universities were concerned principally with intellectual pursuit largely for its own sake and educated a privileged few. The usual caricature of the university man was that of an absent-minded scholar who engaged in esoteric studies and seldom ventured from his ivory tower.

All that has changed, and universities are now places where one can obtain an excellent education, equip oneself with social skills for life and study and train oneself for a profession.

Eric Thomas, vice chancellor of the University of Bristol, says universities are ?the search engines of our society -- they create new knowledge.? Universities have always been the marketplace for the exchange and free movement of ideas. They are also forums where students obtain a basic understanding of human rights, civic virtues and ethical values and learn their duties as citizens of a democracy.

The UP, in the 100 years ahead, will have to perform the traditional role of producing complete, ?universal? persons, and that means giving them a grounding in the liberal arts, sciences and humanities. But it will also have to prepare them for the real world, and that means giving them the knowledge and training for various professions so that they can earn a living and at the same time contribute to the sum of human knowledge.

Richard Florida, professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University, said that in the new economy, ?ideas and intellectual capital have replaced natural resources and mechanical innovations as the raw material of economic growth.? That is why, he said, the university has become ?more critical than ever as a provider of talent, knowledge and innovation in the age of knowledge-based capitalism.?

In these knowledge-driven times, the UP will have to assume a bigger role in national life. But how can it perform its function well when it constantly suffers from lack of funds? Some people have the mistaken notion that a university can run on its own power. But like any other institution, a university has to have sufficient funds to be able to carry out its objectives.

The UP has fallen on hard times principally because of budgetary constraints. It has suffered a brain drain because talented professors have moved to other universities that pay bigger salaries. State-of the-art teaching aids and laboratory equipment are lacking because there are no funds for their acquisition. An indication of the decline of standards at UP is the fact that it barely made it to the list of the THES-QS World University Rankings of the Top 400 Universities, placing 398th.

The leadership of the UP recognizes the real problem of financing and hopes to address this by undertaking an ambitious campaign to raise P5 billion in the next five years. All UP alumni who love their alma mater will have to dig deep into their pockets to help save the university from further decline. Malacañang and Congress should also pitch in by approving more generous outlays for the State University.