The UP That I Know
June 20, 2004 | 12:00am
Walls splattered with protest graffiti; posters and murals in screaming red and black.
Toilets, hallways, walkways, roofs, sheds, roads... virtually no ground escaped the rage of student activists on frequent OD (operation dikit) and OP (operation pinta) missions in my time at the University of the Philippines.
Over 20 years ago at UP, symposia, rallies and plays kept lobbies, theaters, and conference halls packed, nearly every day of class. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were on the crest of power and UP was the thorn in their conjugal stump. They held sway over the nation but UP was plain intractable.
Graffiti still swamp the walls of the women’s toilet at Palma Hall, home to what was the College of Arts and Sciences and is now the College of Arts and Letters. On those walls, we ranted and raged against Marcos. These days on the same walls, UP’s female students are debating sex before marriage. Their discordant views: pre-marital sex is sin, a faith/morality issue, a matter of choice, reason to doubt a man’s sincerity, plain and simple rape.
My generation left UP with either diplomas or M-16s in hand. Taking a stand meant facing up to real risks of arrest, detention, forced disappearance, salvaging or summary execution.
Activists who fell in the night, their bodies dumped in swamps or the belly of bridges, lived on in our books as heroes. The student movement was gathering second wind, packing in bigger rallies at every turn. It was a time to be proud one was an activist.
UP, the students and the faculty, would not yield all ground to the Marcoses. It projected itself to be nearly invincible. Stories that the Marcos-controlled media dutifully ignored saw print in the Philippine Collegian, UP’s official student newspaper.
People read about the rosary with multi-carat diamonds for beads that Ferdinand gave Imelda on their silver wedding anniversary, the forcible dispersal of picket lines; squatters killed in defense of their shanties, and political prisoners beaten to a pulp, raped, their heads dunked in toilet bowls, their nipples and penises zapped by electric current.
UP was where teachers debated with teachers, students with teachers, and students and teachers with university officials, in class and outside. Nearly everyone had an opinion, impervious to age, gender, title, faith or wealth divides. A few spoke louder than many others that watched from the sidelines but stayed tuned to the debates.
Somehow, activists back then managed to command audiences bigger than their usual suspects, the recruited and the converted. With megaphone and prop materials in tow, RTR (room-to-room) teams scoured the classrooms, exhorting students to file out of class and join protest marches. Curiously, often to the lusty approval of many teachers, it was easy to pull a crowd.
Back then, or before EDSA Uno throttled activism into a mainstream, rich and middle-class pursuit, UP-bred activists braved water cannons and truncheons, detention and death but, also as important, read Mao, Marx, and Nietzsche as much as Neruda, Castañeda and Marquez.
By the example of a few good activist teachers, student leaders eschewed turning into academic laggards. It was deemed shameful to fail or falter in class. We were supposed to be not just Red but also Expert.
Joining rallies and making the grade was a tough balancing act but many student leaders did creditably well and graduated on time, with honors.
That, even as, for months on end, UP student leaders had to move house every day, to elude arrest.
That entailed washing and ironing clothes on the run, eating from the cheapest carinderia, reading assigned book chapters and typing class papers and theses from the floor of one shanty after another.
Free escort service by the burly fratmen of UP was the only perk student leaders got, and every so often, a taxi ride out of campus. Yes, the biggest UP fraternities were by then also deeply into activism, gaining for UP a breather from frat rumbles.
Diliman was then swarming with intelligence agents on the trail of student leaders. Mostly fat and dark, the manongs we had for buntot would not part with their sunglasses even inside dark conference rooms, passing themselves off as students. Age and love handles blew their cover off just as readily.
Marcos’ Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile had let loose a series of assos (arrest, search and seizure orders) against a hundred student leaders, mostly from UP and other Metro Manila schools. The assos empowered Marcos Constabulary chief Fidel V. Ramos, Metropolitan Command (Metrocom) director Prospero Olivas, and their dreaded Military Intelligence and Security Group (misg) to snare activists. The usual excuse: alleged subversion.
A year-old asso issued against me landed me a three-month vacation in jail–a month in Bicutan, the Marcos showcase prison for political detainees, and two more in Camp Crame. Marcos perfunctorily lifted martial law and closed Bicutan in January 1981, because the Pope was visiting Manila.
Marcos sent a dozen datnan-panawan male detainees, including Satur Ocampo, to the New Bilibid Prisons in Muntinlupa. The datnan-panawan were the long-termers that remained in jail, even after waves of other political detainees had come and gone.
At peak, over a hundred students were detained in Bicutan, majority of them UP students the police picked up in protest rallies or for painting slogans on walls and bridges. A dozen UP students spent time in Bicutan after they were cornered at a policeman’s house where they had sought refuge, following the dispersal of a rally in Mendiola.
Bicutan affirmed UP’s pre-eminence as the bedrock of activism. Easily three in every four political detainees at the time had passed through UP. In Bicutan I met some of the most brilliant, most committed and most honest Filipinos, majority of them introduced to activism at UP.
To my generation of tibak (short for aktibista and not to be mistaken for the G-string undies that feminists call oppressive), the introduction came with just a few shibboleths and slogans.
No two recruits were ever identical. Some shared a common history steeled in the Bible lessons of social justice by nuns and priests in high school. Poverty was a bond that some others shared. Almost to the last, the recruits were grade A students. Activism lured impressionable, kind-hearted souls in search of worlds and purposes bigger than family and books.
Once introduced, slogans and shibboleths, like a mantra, became summons to service of people, and kept us hooked on activism.
A few favorites topped most activists’ list in my time. Do not let your studies interfere with your education, was one. Studies are about pleasing teachers, making the grade and getting a diploma, and education about making choices, taking a stand, and serving the people.
Kung di tayo kikibo, sino ang kikibo? Kung di tayo kikilos, sino ang kikilos? Kung di ngayon, kailan pa? was a bigger hit. Penned by Philippine Collegian editor Abraham "Ditto" Sarmiento Jr., beloved son of then opposition leader and later Supreme Court Justice Abraham F. Sarmiento.
Marcos jailed Ditto and his fellow editors for alleged subversion in 1974. Soon after, Ditto, who was strong of mind but frail of body, succumbed to illness.
Ditto’s ditty later inspired the theme song of the movie Sakada, a masterpiece of Behn Cervantes, a UP theater arts professor who lent many protest rallies a booming voice, character and chutzpah.
Other illustrious professors like the late Armando J. Malay (former dean of student affairs), Francisco "Dodong" Nemenzo (then dean of the rally-prone College of Arts and Sciences), Randolf David, and Oscar Evangelista and the late Luis D. Beltran (the last two served as Dean of Student Affairs in succession) taught as well as provoked students to focus on both studies and education.
My top pick is yet a third shibboleth: Lean Alejandro. The place of honor is in the line of fire. Murdered by suspected rebel soldiers in 1987 at the prime of his youth, Lean exemplified the best that a UP student could be. Brilliance, passion, generosity and kindness more than just activism, Lean was a good person. And he loved to eat sinigang and pochero, always with his Malabon home-town’s patis.
I’ve returned to UP many times since, on periodic duty as a professorial lecturer in journalism. By all indications, many things have changed, and a few others unchanged.
At multiple stalls of the University Food Service, an unrelenting queue of diners chuck metal food trays with metal fork and spoon. Back then, meals were soggy and bad though cheap; now, the meals are much better, more varied and still quite affordable.
The trees so old with branches and so shriveled have aged some more, and the grass in some parts now as tall as corn stalks.
The Infirmary, in our time sorely lacking in personnel and equipment and aptly christened "infirmatay" for its record of failure in nursing people back to health, has a fresh coat of paint, and seems more lively.
In the 80s, members of the Campus Crusade for Christ hogged the corridors of AS, on constant lookout for passersby who could be drawn into faith-sharing chats. Christ is the Answer, their pamphlet said. What is the Question? the activists retorted. Today, student organizations locate their tambayan at circular stone sheds built around Palma Hall.
One man is mute witness to the passage of time and generations at UP–The Oblation of national artist Guillermo Tolentino. Still he stands naked, but for a leaf covering his privates, arms spread and head held up to the heavens, a sculpture inspired by the second stanza of Rizal’s Mi Ultimo Adios, supposed celebration of the youth’s yearning for learning.
By UP’s annals and oral tradition, The Oblation was carved in the image and likeness of two models: the father of Da King, Fernando Poe Sr. and fireman June Villanueva. He just looks so wrong, however. He bursts with so much testosterone, quite unlike the many lanky nerds who walk the grounds of UP.
The bespectacled tubercular is my singular image of the typical male Iskolar ng Bayan, and goody-two-shoes Neneng, the typical female. Despite today’s reportedly altered ratios between rich and poor, needy and greedy students, I keep faith that UP remains the University of the People, haven in my time to the scholar and the activist.
Scholarship and activism? The twin narrative strings make up the UP story.
On parallel track, they unfold and could well serve as UP’s heritage. Pop the question on any Filipino teener, adult, elderly: What is UP all about? Invariably, they would likely say: mga aktibista (activists) at matatalino (scholars).
Aktibista at matatalino and on both counts, mayayabang? An alumnae that voters just sent back to the Senate had served fungus-faced Filipinos due notice: avowedly the best and the brightest march out of UP, and the rest less blessed, out of all other schools. The UP mystique– myth or legend or folktale– apparently endures, and most Filipinos are in thrall still.
Want to be dazzled further? Six of the 14 Philippine presidents graduated from or studied at UP. Given to generosity in excess, it has conferred honorary doctorates on all 14, including Joseph Estrada.
About 60,000 high school seniors take the UP College Admissions Test every year, but only a tenth or 6,000 make the grade. Founded in 1908, UP at 96 counts over 200,000 alumni, runs 45 degree-granting and 32 research and extension service programs, including an Open University, and has a faculty littered with 1,100 PhDs.
For good or ill, activism is the tradition, the source of insuperable pride and ego, the claim to fame and notoriety of UP, the university with a big attitude. The rage, aborted careers, altered lives, the labors, the lives of tens of thousands of activists are writ large on UP’s history.
Activism seems to have lost tempo or passion in recent years, but still it thrives at UP. It does possibly because it has a firm, unshakable root in the one true thing everyone in UP hold sacred: academic freedom. To the last man and woman, student or teacher, everyone in UP rushes to the defense of academic freedom, whenever and wherever it comes under threat, whether real or potential or imagined.
But is scholarship a fait accompli as well at UP? Is it as firmly rooted in academic excellence, or at least a constant striving for academic excellence?
The support systems exist to make that happen. For one, the UP Main Library, which has possibly the largest collection of titles in all RP, works by the norms of Harvard’s Widener.
Big as it is, the UP Main Libe pales in comparison, of course, to Widener’s grossly huge collection. But like Widener, the UP Main Libe allows students freedom to pull books out of open stacks, until their eyes pop and their brains addle from too much reading.
What about the faculty? Over a thousand of them have PhDs, but UP has lost quite a number to jobs with better pay and greater challenges overseas. With workloads so heavy and pay so paltry, it is small wonder that a growing number of UP teachers have signed up as consultants with development agencies and multilateral institutions.
UP used to get as much state support as it needed, budget-wise. Then, it could afford to hire more teachers and provide appropriately to keep talents on board. Today, UP reels from a budget progressively declining in real value as the demand for bigger budget support for other state colleges and universities grows.
My theory is UP might do better even with less. UP could not afford to do worse. Strife and want are situations that seem to jolt UP to endure and excel.
Every UP generation has a distinct story to tell. Mine is sad, bloody but proud. It is a story we share with all Filipinos who lived through the dark days of Marcos and his cabal of UP alumni.
UP draws the best and the worst of people. UP gives us the best and the worst of times. That could well be the irony of UP.
The author served as editor-in-chief of the Philippine Collegian in 1979-80, and chairperson of the University Student Council in 1980-81, on its first year of restoration after martial law.
Toilets, hallways, walkways, roofs, sheds, roads... virtually no ground escaped the rage of student activists on frequent OD (operation dikit) and OP (operation pinta) missions in my time at the University of the Philippines.
Over 20 years ago at UP, symposia, rallies and plays kept lobbies, theaters, and conference halls packed, nearly every day of class. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were on the crest of power and UP was the thorn in their conjugal stump. They held sway over the nation but UP was plain intractable.
Graffiti still swamp the walls of the women’s toilet at Palma Hall, home to what was the College of Arts and Sciences and is now the College of Arts and Letters. On those walls, we ranted and raged against Marcos. These days on the same walls, UP’s female students are debating sex before marriage. Their discordant views: pre-marital sex is sin, a faith/morality issue, a matter of choice, reason to doubt a man’s sincerity, plain and simple rape.
My generation left UP with either diplomas or M-16s in hand. Taking a stand meant facing up to real risks of arrest, detention, forced disappearance, salvaging or summary execution.
Activists who fell in the night, their bodies dumped in swamps or the belly of bridges, lived on in our books as heroes. The student movement was gathering second wind, packing in bigger rallies at every turn. It was a time to be proud one was an activist.
People read about the rosary with multi-carat diamonds for beads that Ferdinand gave Imelda on their silver wedding anniversary, the forcible dispersal of picket lines; squatters killed in defense of their shanties, and political prisoners beaten to a pulp, raped, their heads dunked in toilet bowls, their nipples and penises zapped by electric current.
UP was where teachers debated with teachers, students with teachers, and students and teachers with university officials, in class and outside. Nearly everyone had an opinion, impervious to age, gender, title, faith or wealth divides. A few spoke louder than many others that watched from the sidelines but stayed tuned to the debates.
Somehow, activists back then managed to command audiences bigger than their usual suspects, the recruited and the converted. With megaphone and prop materials in tow, RTR (room-to-room) teams scoured the classrooms, exhorting students to file out of class and join protest marches. Curiously, often to the lusty approval of many teachers, it was easy to pull a crowd.
Back then, or before EDSA Uno throttled activism into a mainstream, rich and middle-class pursuit, UP-bred activists braved water cannons and truncheons, detention and death but, also as important, read Mao, Marx, and Nietzsche as much as Neruda, Castañeda and Marquez.
Joining rallies and making the grade was a tough balancing act but many student leaders did creditably well and graduated on time, with honors.
That, even as, for months on end, UP student leaders had to move house every day, to elude arrest.
That entailed washing and ironing clothes on the run, eating from the cheapest carinderia, reading assigned book chapters and typing class papers and theses from the floor of one shanty after another.
Free escort service by the burly fratmen of UP was the only perk student leaders got, and every so often, a taxi ride out of campus. Yes, the biggest UP fraternities were by then also deeply into activism, gaining for UP a breather from frat rumbles.
Diliman was then swarming with intelligence agents on the trail of student leaders. Mostly fat and dark, the manongs we had for buntot would not part with their sunglasses even inside dark conference rooms, passing themselves off as students. Age and love handles blew their cover off just as readily.
Marcos’ Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile had let loose a series of assos (arrest, search and seizure orders) against a hundred student leaders, mostly from UP and other Metro Manila schools. The assos empowered Marcos Constabulary chief Fidel V. Ramos, Metropolitan Command (Metrocom) director Prospero Olivas, and their dreaded Military Intelligence and Security Group (misg) to snare activists. The usual excuse: alleged subversion.
Marcos sent a dozen datnan-panawan male detainees, including Satur Ocampo, to the New Bilibid Prisons in Muntinlupa. The datnan-panawan were the long-termers that remained in jail, even after waves of other political detainees had come and gone.
At peak, over a hundred students were detained in Bicutan, majority of them UP students the police picked up in protest rallies or for painting slogans on walls and bridges. A dozen UP students spent time in Bicutan after they were cornered at a policeman’s house where they had sought refuge, following the dispersal of a rally in Mendiola.
Bicutan affirmed UP’s pre-eminence as the bedrock of activism. Easily three in every four political detainees at the time had passed through UP. In Bicutan I met some of the most brilliant, most committed and most honest Filipinos, majority of them introduced to activism at UP.
To my generation of tibak (short for aktibista and not to be mistaken for the G-string undies that feminists call oppressive), the introduction came with just a few shibboleths and slogans.
No two recruits were ever identical. Some shared a common history steeled in the Bible lessons of social justice by nuns and priests in high school. Poverty was a bond that some others shared. Almost to the last, the recruits were grade A students. Activism lured impressionable, kind-hearted souls in search of worlds and purposes bigger than family and books.
A few favorites topped most activists’ list in my time. Do not let your studies interfere with your education, was one. Studies are about pleasing teachers, making the grade and getting a diploma, and education about making choices, taking a stand, and serving the people.
Kung di tayo kikibo, sino ang kikibo? Kung di tayo kikilos, sino ang kikilos? Kung di ngayon, kailan pa? was a bigger hit. Penned by Philippine Collegian editor Abraham "Ditto" Sarmiento Jr., beloved son of then opposition leader and later Supreme Court Justice Abraham F. Sarmiento.
Marcos jailed Ditto and his fellow editors for alleged subversion in 1974. Soon after, Ditto, who was strong of mind but frail of body, succumbed to illness.
Ditto’s ditty later inspired the theme song of the movie Sakada, a masterpiece of Behn Cervantes, a UP theater arts professor who lent many protest rallies a booming voice, character and chutzpah.
Other illustrious professors like the late Armando J. Malay (former dean of student affairs), Francisco "Dodong" Nemenzo (then dean of the rally-prone College of Arts and Sciences), Randolf David, and Oscar Evangelista and the late Luis D. Beltran (the last two served as Dean of Student Affairs in succession) taught as well as provoked students to focus on both studies and education.
My top pick is yet a third shibboleth: Lean Alejandro. The place of honor is in the line of fire. Murdered by suspected rebel soldiers in 1987 at the prime of his youth, Lean exemplified the best that a UP student could be. Brilliance, passion, generosity and kindness more than just activism, Lean was a good person. And he loved to eat sinigang and pochero, always with his Malabon home-town’s patis.
At multiple stalls of the University Food Service, an unrelenting queue of diners chuck metal food trays with metal fork and spoon. Back then, meals were soggy and bad though cheap; now, the meals are much better, more varied and still quite affordable.
The trees so old with branches and so shriveled have aged some more, and the grass in some parts now as tall as corn stalks.
The Infirmary, in our time sorely lacking in personnel and equipment and aptly christened "infirmatay" for its record of failure in nursing people back to health, has a fresh coat of paint, and seems more lively.
In the 80s, members of the Campus Crusade for Christ hogged the corridors of AS, on constant lookout for passersby who could be drawn into faith-sharing chats. Christ is the Answer, their pamphlet said. What is the Question? the activists retorted. Today, student organizations locate their tambayan at circular stone sheds built around Palma Hall.
By UP’s annals and oral tradition, The Oblation was carved in the image and likeness of two models: the father of Da King, Fernando Poe Sr. and fireman June Villanueva. He just looks so wrong, however. He bursts with so much testosterone, quite unlike the many lanky nerds who walk the grounds of UP.
The bespectacled tubercular is my singular image of the typical male Iskolar ng Bayan, and goody-two-shoes Neneng, the typical female. Despite today’s reportedly altered ratios between rich and poor, needy and greedy students, I keep faith that UP remains the University of the People, haven in my time to the scholar and the activist.
On parallel track, they unfold and could well serve as UP’s heritage. Pop the question on any Filipino teener, adult, elderly: What is UP all about? Invariably, they would likely say: mga aktibista (activists) at matatalino (scholars).
Aktibista at matatalino and on both counts, mayayabang? An alumnae that voters just sent back to the Senate had served fungus-faced Filipinos due notice: avowedly the best and the brightest march out of UP, and the rest less blessed, out of all other schools. The UP mystique– myth or legend or folktale– apparently endures, and most Filipinos are in thrall still.
Want to be dazzled further? Six of the 14 Philippine presidents graduated from or studied at UP. Given to generosity in excess, it has conferred honorary doctorates on all 14, including Joseph Estrada.
About 60,000 high school seniors take the UP College Admissions Test every year, but only a tenth or 6,000 make the grade. Founded in 1908, UP at 96 counts over 200,000 alumni, runs 45 degree-granting and 32 research and extension service programs, including an Open University, and has a faculty littered with 1,100 PhDs.
For good or ill, activism is the tradition, the source of insuperable pride and ego, the claim to fame and notoriety of UP, the university with a big attitude. The rage, aborted careers, altered lives, the labors, the lives of tens of thousands of activists are writ large on UP’s history.
Activism seems to have lost tempo or passion in recent years, but still it thrives at UP. It does possibly because it has a firm, unshakable root in the one true thing everyone in UP hold sacred: academic freedom. To the last man and woman, student or teacher, everyone in UP rushes to the defense of academic freedom, whenever and wherever it comes under threat, whether real or potential or imagined.
The support systems exist to make that happen. For one, the UP Main Library, which has possibly the largest collection of titles in all RP, works by the norms of Harvard’s Widener.
Big as it is, the UP Main Libe pales in comparison, of course, to Widener’s grossly huge collection. But like Widener, the UP Main Libe allows students freedom to pull books out of open stacks, until their eyes pop and their brains addle from too much reading.
What about the faculty? Over a thousand of them have PhDs, but UP has lost quite a number to jobs with better pay and greater challenges overseas. With workloads so heavy and pay so paltry, it is small wonder that a growing number of UP teachers have signed up as consultants with development agencies and multilateral institutions.
My theory is UP might do better even with less. UP could not afford to do worse. Strife and want are situations that seem to jolt UP to endure and excel.
Every UP generation has a distinct story to tell. Mine is sad, bloody but proud. It is a story we share with all Filipinos who lived through the dark days of Marcos and his cabal of UP alumni.
UP draws the best and the worst of people. UP gives us the best and the worst of times. That could well be the irony of UP.
The author served as editor-in-chief of the Philippine Collegian in 1979-80, and chairperson of the University Student Council in 1980-81, on its first year of restoration after martial law.
BrandSpace Articles
<
>
- Latest
- Trending
Trending
Latest