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ANOTHER
professor at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) may
face suspension after a top school official remained
open to the possibility of enforcing disciplinary action
against faculty members.
“As with
any enterprise, anything is possible,” AIM president
Francis G. Estrada told BusinessMirror on Monday, when
asked a direct question about the likelihood of another
faculty member being suspended.
Estrada’s assertion has fueled speculation that the
school’s management may soon enforce disciplinary action
against Felix Bustos, a core faculty member of AIM’s
Washington Sycip Graduate School of Business.
If
implemented, Bustos, who is among the pool of AIM
writers for BusinessMirror’s opinion page, will be the
third professor to be disciplined during the term of
Estrada, following the one-year suspension of professors
Emmanuel A. Leyco and Victor S. Limlingan for
“dysfunctional behavior” last July.
In
February, the two submitted a letter demanding a salary
hike for AIM employees and professors worth nearly P1
billion during an important school event. According to
Estrada, the event was attended by very important senior
management people including a former Malaysian cabinet
official and the chairman of India’s largest business
process outsourcing company, among others.
In
submitting the letter during the said event, Estrada
said that AIM management “felt that there was a desire
to embarrass and hurt the institution.”
He also
asserted that their money claim “had no basis and
substance” because a law mandating schools to allot 70
percent of their tuition hikes was not applicable to
AIM.
“AIM has
a certification indicating that we had no tuition fee
increases over the last five years,” Estrada said,
adding that the money claim was only limited to three
years as per the
Philippines’
statute of limitations.
Meanwhile, last month, the institute issued Bustos a
notice of administrative charge, claiming that a
consultancy he accepted from the Bangko Sentral ng
Pilipinas (BSP) in 2004 was in conflict with his
standing as a tenured faculty member of the AIM.
Bustos
is the treasurer of the AIM Faculty Association, of
which Leyco and Limlingan is president and chairman,
respectively.
In a
phone interview Tuesday, Bustos said that he has replied
to the notice, asserting that the charge was baseless.
The school’s management since then has not yet replied,
according to Bustos.
Meanwhile, an e-mail message sent last week to AIM
professors and later forwarded to BusinessMirror said
that “students are not benefited being deprived of Vic
Limlingan and Noel Leyco, and it seems, possibly Felix
Bustos.”
“It
remains a tragedy, an escalating tragedy, that things
have come to this point,” the writer of the e-mailed
message added. “Management should get off its Rambo trip
and resolve matters.”
For his
part, Estrada said that the school’s management remains
willing to listen and to accommodate legitimate
complaints from the faculty.
“We’ve
had actual meetings and what was decided was that we
were going to accommodate the views to the extent
reasonable from the faculty and alumni,” Estrada said. |
