Paper is often a trusted companion for students, but what happens when these documents become a roadblock in obtaining their freedom to utilize university spaces?
Excessive paper requirements and monetary facility fees.
Various sectoral student organizations have emerged as key interests for students beyond the classrooms of Polytechnic University of the Philippines - Manila. These groups have been continuously benefiting and supporting the holistic well-being of PUPians. However, they still face challenges in accessing university spaces due to bureaucratic hurdles, resonating that inaccessibility to quality education continues to manifest in many forms.
To ensure school organizations function effectively, they often require venues for meetings, events, conferences, and other activities. In the university, you could find such spaces that could properly cater to the needs of these organizations like Claro M. Recto Hall, Bulwagang Balagtas, and Accenture Room that are conducively facilitated, but these facilities are not like balls that you could grab at your convenience.
It is widely recognized that student organizations face significant challenges when it comes to reserving and requesting such spaces. While it is just valid to make students submit the necessary paperwork to formalize and document their use of venues, numerous loopholes persist that continue to hinder students' access to these spaces.
Although the venue request form is available on the university website, the detailed and precise instructions are not widely shared. If the students are not familiar with the administrative process of the university, the posted form will be difficult to comprehend, forcing students to rely on their personal networks to fully grasp the necessary instructions.
Unfortunately, even a minor error in the paperwork can result in needing to redo everything repeatedly, leading them to go from place to place, offices, and persons in charge, which can lead to significant time-consuming and printing costs for students—and do not get me started on the costs. Just as paperwork can be a hassle, the increasing facility fees are equally unjustifiable.
Students seeking to use these venues are obliged to pay the energy, maintenance, and usage fees associated with the facilities, leading to an ironic narrative—a state and tax-funded university intended to support financially struggling students is imposing additional micro fees. Since many students and organizations are not materially able to meet the necessary requirements, they are forced to improvise and be resilient, holding their events in whatever spaces they can find—lobbies, hallways, and unused classrooms—even if those places are not well conducive.
At the College of Communication (COC), there are 24 sectoral student organizations, but only two facilities are available to meet their space needs: the COC Theater and the COC Audio Visual Room (AVR). Over the past years, students have primarily utilized the AVR, as it required coordination only with the college department rather than the broader university management. However, this year it was announced that the AVR will now fall under the university’s Facility Management Office (FaMO), meaning COC students must now comply with the same paperwork and requirements as other university event facilities—including monetary fees.
Given the college's current predicament, it appears that students have no choice but to utilize their lobbies and parking lots—an approach that has been commonly happening.
These organizations are forced to crowd themselves into the limited spaces in the college. It is unfortunate that most COC organizations mainly focus on implementing mass-amplifying campaign programs, such as documentaries, broadcasting segments, seminars, and conferences, whose necessary equipment requires large venues.
The students' and organizations' remarkable resilience should not be romanticized nor exploited; these student efforts should not be blanketed by accountability, because in a problem when initiatives are the only ones being recognized, it will just make an applauding hand, not a helping one.
Time and time again, despite being repeatedly emphasized, which it should be, the ongoing challenges with student spaces, bureaucracy, and these micro facility fees can be traced back to budget deficits imposed on the university. If continuous underbudgeting persists, it will just continue to birth many forms and faces an educational crisis, such as the depravity of student spaces.
As student organizations are the primary victims of this issue, it is even more crucial for them to make these issues visible to the majority. To expose the existing nemesis of student organizations and to broaden their calls by involving students, even those not directly part of these organizations. We must remember that to deprive these students of their freedom of space is also to limit their capabilities and fullest potential.
These complex processes of paper requirements and fees are just a domino effect caused by a much larger systematic problem: the continuous neglection of the government to allocate enough budget to the education sector while it fits their current image and propaganda; a fascist administration that does not want conscious and educated citizens. If these student space issues are unsolved, the keys and solutions to these bureaucratic paper chains will continue to be unfound.
One thing is certain: students will exhaust their means to find these keys in trying to open the chains, even though we all know it was intentionally hidden from them in the first place.
Article: James Justin Capistrano
Cartoon: Luke Perry Saycon
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