'What am I supposed to do, HR?'

OVER the years, I get a lot of queries from school administrators related to labor management and human resources in the academe, especially at the start and end of every semester or school year and even semestral breaks, questions like, "Is it legal for our HR to ask our permanent faculty to sign contracts every semester?" "Can we engage teachers without license and faculty without a master's degree?" and "Can our HR hire new teachers on a one-year fixed-term contract instead of probationary contracts?" Sometimes, to be sure, these questions are referred and endorsed by the schools to the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) for opinion.

At the outset, educational institutions, like all employers, are entitled to exercise management prerogatives over the school's human resources. In colleges and universities, management prerogatives are stronger under the constitutional guarantee of academic freedom. According to jurisprudence, part of such freedom is the selection of faculty or the freedom to determine, on academic grounds, "who shall teach." This area of managing the human resources in schools is subject to external governance or the standards-setting of the DepEd and CHEd as part of quality assurance, but as jurisprudence also holds, in no case shall it amount to control of educational institutions.