From cheating come crooks, pretenders

The Board of Regents of the University of the Philippines meets today, hopefully to tackle a festering issue that involves not only a grievous case of intellectual dishonesty, but also, on a larger plane, academic governance.

An incidence of cheating by students of the UP School of Economics (UPSE) has morphed into a case that raises the fundamental point of academic integrity and, as a consequence, questions the state university’s very adherence to its motto of “Honor and Excellence.”

It’s high time the Board of Regents turned its gaze on this case — and handed down a just resolution; else, who’s to deny that UP is now content to merely and blithely reflect the society in which it operates?

The circumstances are simple and require no training in rocket science to understand.

Certain students cheated at an examination. Other students saw the act of dishonesty and bore witness to it to a faculty member. Having been thus apprised, the faculty member brought the matter to the dean, who, according to protocol, forthwith formed a college disciplinary committee (CDC) that included a representative of the university.

After a three-month inquiry, the CDC found the accused students guilty of cheating and made its recommendations, which the dean adopted and forwarded to UP Diliman’s Executive Committee, led by the chancellor and comprising all deans of the colleges. The executive committee approved the findings and recommendations and sent these to UP president Danilo Concepcion.

What happened next defies comprehension, and demands explanation. From accounts and statements, the UP president reversed the verdict on one student and sat on the cases of the other two. The UPSE was instructed to reinstate the withheld grade of the first student, which would have allowed the student’s name to be included in the list of candidates for graduation.

But the UPSE faculty members balked at this, and, to a man and woman, signed an appeal to the Board of Regents seeking a reversal of the UP president’s decision. They cited the 2012 Code of Student Conduct which, among other things, states the fundamental principle that incidences of intellectual dishonesty are to be “managed exclusively by academic peers,” and not according to “overly legalistic procedures and standards of the past.”

They added: “By casting doubt on the capacity of academic colleagues even to act as ‘reasonable minds’ in judgment over academic issues, the President’s Decision erodes the faculty’s power to assess and to discipline students and sends a signal to students — particularly to potential witnesses — that truth-telling, honest work, and holding oneself and one’s peers to account will be unappreciated and not worth the trouble. That what matters instead is the same tiresome fact of one’s position of privilege and ability to appeal to higher powers.”

Does this find resonance in the daily lives of Filipinos? Of course it does, specially in these troubling times when truth-telling has acquired the contours of a dangerous pursuit, and the dissembling and distortion of history have become de rigueur. (For example, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ eldest child, who claimed to have graduated from UP and Princeton, and was roundly rebuffed by both institutions, even managed to make it to the Senate.)

In the Philippines’ premier educational institution where — if Sen. Bato dela Rosa must know — students learn to think critically, to question wrongdoing and injustice, and (not least) to comport themselves with honor, a high intolerance of dishonesty is necessary.

To condone cheating is to breed pretenders — the sort that would cheat with the end in view of acing the grades needed for an excellent academic record, which would pave the way for hotshot jobs after graduation.

To condone cheating is to breed crooks — the sort that would in the future see no harm in, say, skimming off the top of a public works contract or in making a pile at Customs.

The strength of conviction behind the opposition to the UP president’s decision regarding this case of cheating is formidable: apart from the UPSE dean and faculty members, its Student Council and all eight of its student organizations, along with the UP Diliman Student Council and the League of College Councils.

The ball is in the hands of the Board of Regents. It cannot not rule judiciously.