Letter requesting support for Dr. Encanto

To all members and alumni of the UP Journalism Club
To all students and alumni of the UP College of Mass Communication

Dr. Georgina Encanto, who was dean of the UP College of Mass Communication from 1984 to 1990, has been nominated for the presidency of the University of the Philippines System. This is the first time that anyone from our College has ever been in contention for the highest post in our University.

I would appreciate your support for her, not only because she is member of the faculty of UP-CMC, but also because she has the vision, plan of action and the will to carry that plan out to extricate the University from its present crisis.

As you all know, the University is besieged by a host of problems, the heart of which is financial. As a result, the University has been losing its faculty to other universities and to private industry, and its facilities are in a state of decrepitude. This has had an inevitable impact on instruction and research, and undermines the University’s proclaimed commitment to excellence.

Dr. Encanto has vowed to address the financial crisis as her first priority, in the belief that excellence can truly flourish if the University is able to keep its faculty and to upgrade its facilities. But she knows too that, given the UP’s character as a state university, this cannot be achieved by raising tuition and other fees because it would deny students from low-income families access to UP education.

To address the UP’s financial problems Dr. Encanto will therefore raise funds from sources outside the University, from both the public as well as private sectors, and from UP alumni through an aggressive campaign she intends to launch once she is appointed. She is also committed to the reexamination of the STFAP towards making it more realistic and truly socialized.

I can provide no other details at this point, since Dr. Encanto is still in the middle of completing her plan of action. But as her colleague of many years, let me assure everyone– and I am sure those who are or were her students will attest to this—that Dr. Encanto has the will to carry out, and will find the support needed for, the realization of her vision for the University.

I can cite as evidence for this her record in the deanship of UP-CMC. It was through her efforts primarily that the then Institute of Mass Communication became a college midway into her term in 1988. She also initiated one of the most meaningful extension projects to ever come from UP-CMC, and obtained the funding for it from external sources. This is the Graciano Lopez Jaena Journalism Workshop, which ran beyond her term for 12 years, and which resulted in helping raise the professional and ethical standards of community journalism, and in the College’s enhancing its influence among the 3,000 practitioners the program has graduated.

In addition, Dr. Encanto put in place the mechanisms for democratic decision-making among the faculty and non-academic personnel that for some reason had not been previously established in UP-CMC. She also organized the UP-CMC Foundation to support the College through fund and facilities solicitations and other initiatives. Throughout her term, Dr. Encanto kept lines of communication open with students through frequent consultations with College organizations through the student-faculty relations committee and the student assemblies. It was also Dr. Encanto who made possible the publication of the Philippine Communication Journal, the forerunner of CMC’s Plaridel Journal.

It is thus in the spirit of working for a better University and a better College that I am appealing for your support for Dr. Encanto for President of the University of the Philippines.

Yours sincerely,

LUIS V. TEODORO
Professor of Journalism and former dean,
UP College of Mass Communication