Justice Frankfurter’s articulation of the breadth of the academic freedom of an institution of higher learning is unbeatable: It is the right to determine who should teach, whom to teach, what to teach and how to teach. In several cases, our own Supreme Court has invoked this doctrine and has upheld the right of the university to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit to its courses of study. Thus, it follows that appurtenant to academic freedom is the right to set admission requirements. One of these can very well be testing for the use of or habituation to dangerous drugs. In the landmark case of Garcia v. Loyola School of Theology (1975), inevitably cited in all discourses on academic freedom, our High Court said of the right of the institution to determine admission policies:
“It is free from outside coercion or interference save possibly when the overriding public welfare calls for some restraint. It has a wide sphere of autonomy certainly extending to the choice of students. This constitutional provision is not to be construed in a niggardly manner or in a grudging fashion. That would be to frustrate its purpose, nullify its intent.”
While it is true that Republic Act No. 9165 provides for “mandatory, random drug testing” in schools, there should be nothing constitutionally amiss about a university requiring all of its students submission to a drug test as a requirement for admission. This would merely be the university’s exercise of its academic freedom. Lest it be theorized that state universities, as instrumentalities of national government, do not enjoy the same latitude of freedom in regard to decisions about the admission of students, it should suffice to heed the doctrine of the Supreme Court in University of the Philippines v. Ligot-Telan (1993) where the UP’s right to refuse admission to a student on disciplinary grounds was held to be well encompassed by the scope of its academic freedom.
So, while there is no doubt that the CHED may, in the exercise of its regulatory authority, issue guidelines on mandatory but random drug testing, a university may not be begrudged its right to exercise its academic freedom by requiring of all of its students, as a condition for enrollment, submission to a drug test. There certainly is a right to education, and, arguably, a right to higher education, but there certainly is no such thing as a right to be admitted into a university. Determining whether a student may or may not be admitted constitutes an exercise of discretion on the part of the university—particularly its instructional corps—and as such, by long settled jurisprudence, cannot be compelled by mandamus.
That a student’s privacy is intruded into by the test, there will hardly be argument, but when one seeks admission into a university, even a state university, one’s expectation of privacy, on which rests claims to the penumbral right of privacy, cannot include holding the university’s inquiry at bay into whether the applicant for admission is using or, worse, habituated, to prohibited substances. The student does not shed his rights at the university’s threshold to be sure, but neither can he insist that the university shed all of its prerogatives when he comes knocking, seeking admission. And the claim to a violation of rights loses even more force when the university shows that the purpose of testing is not principally to exclude those who test positive in the results, but to lead them, if found necessary, to the needed intervention—medical, psychological and spiritual.
When a university is huge, one drug-crazed student who manages to elude detection, enters the classroom and goes berserk can leave a swath of devastation in his trail. We need not wait for this horrible prospect to become real before university’s exercise their well-enshrined rights judiciously, but resolutely!
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@outlook.com
