Weeks before the battle for the student council seats blaze, shots of ballot-casting have already been fired and the battle cries for student rights have echoed through UP's corridors.

From January 26 to 30, a system-wide voting has commenced, the issue: the Codified Rules for the Student Regent Selection or better known as the CRSRS. The cry was for the approval of the CRSRS referendum by means of a "YES or NO" voting process to be participated by the entire student body of the UP systems all over the country.

The CRSRS is a document that gives legal mandate to the office of the student regent to perform the task of representing the student body of the university without any intervention from the university administration maintaining it to be a purely student-governed body. It also ensures the ammendments in the document itself remains a right of the student-governing body.

"The UP Charter requires that the students can only select a student regent from teir ranks if and only if the rules and qualifications are approved in a referendum by the students", a flyer from the pro-YES campaign explains as an important factor to secure the right to choose a student regent, the right to fair representation to the Board of Regents (BOR), and the right to ammend and improve the CRSRS, remains a power of the student body.

However, there are also calls among the ranks of the students to reject the document and vote for a no, fearing that ammendments will take a negative turn on the students and make matters worse.

And so the battle was on, for five days the students made a decision to fight for their right to be fairly represented in the university's halls of power. By the end of the week, 26,000 students from all the UP systems has turned out to vote, and 73% of that voter turn-over yeilded a YES for the CRSRS.

Wuth a battle won, it's clear that it is still up to the students to decide the fate of their rights in play of power within the bounds of the university. Everyone is expected to perform their duties not only as an individual student of UP, but as one student body that encompasses not only academic and extra-curricular freedom, but also to carry the weight of responsibility in this delicate balance, in the struggle of power outside and within the walls of the university.

Sources:
The Philippine Collegian
The Philippine Collegian final tally