16/08/2025
| Living off Scraps: An Explainer on the Demand to
The hollow phrase for “resilience” has long clouded what should really be seen as neglect. No, there is no honor in scraping by and romanticizing the struggle; and there certainly is no excellence in slaving in a system that asks for so much yet gives so little.
Between long hours in classrooms and workshops that empty out before the work is done, Fine Arts students in UP Cebu have always been left to stretch what little time they are given to fit the limits set before them. Even the dullest work cannot survive in conditions built to exhaust—and one thing is for sure: they are tired of being resourceful.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗴𝗴𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲
The myth of “hard work” under neoliberal education is that learning is measured in the quality of deliverables, never the process, and what it demands almost always outweighs what it forces students to endure.
Before any extension was granted, Fine Arts students whose work spilled past the nine-to-five schedule had to make do in corners that were not meant to house heavy labor. Those who lived on-campus were barred from working on plates in their own rooms and were told the library and study halls were off-limits, leaving them to figure out where to go and how to work when the campus itself had shut down around them.
Most of them turned to the kiosks—small, open-air structures around the campus that are vulnerable to erratic weather patterns and the occasional power outage—and with the exception of a fortunate few who have the means to work off-campus, there was no other option that gave Fine Arts students even a sliver of the time they needed to finish the demands of their course.
Over time, the patchwork solutions became harder to tolerate. Students from other programs began lamenting in anonymous entries that Fine Arts students were hogging space meant to be shared. In truth, they had simply become the most visible symptom of a deeper scarcity, a reminder that the university has never had enough space to begin with.
Even when they tried to work within the system, to secure access through proper channels, the bureaucratic process only slowed them down further. Eventually, a more coordinated refusal to keep bearing the brunt of institutional neglect began to take shape—and by the end of the first semester, that frustration gave way to action.
𝗔 𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮 𝗗𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘆
It was in November 2024 when the university student council and the academic organizations of the department held consultations with Fine Arts students to gather accounts of just how unsustainable the existing setup had become. Soon after, a social media rally was launched to bring the issue into the public eye. A letter addressed to the College Dean was sent weeks after, in December, to request 24/7 access to workshop spaces and selected classrooms, backed by several student organizations and members of the faculty who knew all too well that creativity cannot be confined to office hours.
What came after were months of follow-ups and an administration that responded with silence far louder than any refusal. All the while, students continued working in spaces that closed too early and opened too late, cutting short the very process they were expected to perfect.
By February 2025, Fine Arts students were finally granted access, but only until midnight. Sure, it was a win, hard-fought and long overdue; but for a program where projects can take days, weeks, even months of constant refining, the extension was merely survivable.
For a college built on the promise of inspiring creativity, it somehow forgets that art takes time. Not the kind measured in rigid slots or swept away by the last call of the guard, but the kind that lingers, retraces, reworks. Art needs time to fail and begin again. To doubt and discover. It cannot be forced into a closing hour, nor finished within the cracks of an already demanding academic schedule.
Subsequently, time means little without the space to hold it. To create is to move, to return, to leave something behind and come back to it hours or days later. To deny consistent, sufficient access to their studios, creation becomes cramped and fragmented. The space shrinks, and with it, the confidence to take risks. How long can one sustain the weight of their passion when the institution that promises to nurture it is the very thing wearing it down?
As the college transitions under new leadership in August, there is a chance to do more than inherit the delays. There is a chance to act. The question is whether this new administration will keep students waiting, or finally meet them where they have already bent and broken to be.
The need to extend workshop hours grows as the program itself continues to expand, and still, it is the students who stretch themselves thin to fill the space that should have been theirs to begin with. Fine Arts students have always made something out of nothing; but scraps are not enough for a community that has long made full meals out of them.
| Report by Margie Markland
| Layout by Erna Bonsukan
