As I noted in a Facebook post last week, attending a graduation at the University of the Philippines, as I did last July 5th, always brings a tear to my eye, especially when everyone sings “UP Naming Mahal” at the closing. No matter all the heartaches, disappointments and challenges we may have gone through in UP as a student, teacher, administrator and alumnus, and no matter all our disagreements over failed policies, missed opportunities and misdirected priorities – as an institution, this university of the people remains immutably noble in purpose, an ideal constantly being realized.
More than 5,000 students graduated from Diliman last week, as well as many more thousands in UP’s eight other constituent universities across the country. Thousands came away with honors – raising the question of whether our students have really gotten that much better, or if our standards seem to be getting laxer; the debate goes on, although no one’s taking anything away from the laureates. This was, after all – as UP president Angelo Jimenez noted – the last pandemic batch to graduate, who entered UP in extremely difficult circumstances, tied down to Zoom, without the benefit of campus life for a significant period.
I sat at the grandstand in Quezon Hall as a professor emeritus among the university’s officials and guests, recalling how I had stood on the other side of that amphitheater more than four decades ago, wondering what the future would be like (short answer: 35 more years in UP). I would become a professor, an administrator and a retiree, as deeply engaged in university affairs as I had been as an activist toting a molotov cocktail (which I never threw) at the Diliman Commune in 1971.
That morning’s guest speaker was former ombudsman and Justice Conchita Carpio Morales, whose biography I had written, so I was glad to run into her at the processional, and I urged her to give everyone a piece of her famous mind. “I’ll be gentle today,” she told me, smiling. Taking off on this year’s commencement theme of “Gumagalang” or “respectfully,” she spoke on the need for respect of the law at a time of great confusion over who and what to follow.
“In a world increasingly divided by arrogance, intolerance and indifference, the call to gumalang (respect) is not merely timely, but urgent,” she said. “As a magistrate, it pains me to see lawmakers alleged to be lawbreakers. Rules bent, redefined or misinterpreted to suit individual or group interests. There is little paggalang for those who have limited or no voice at all. The powerless have become dispensable… The rule of law is the bedrock of democracy. Sadly, in many parts of the world today, the rule of law is being disregarded… Unfortunately, what we increasingly see today in many places is the rule of man, where the exercise of power depends less on the law and more on the whims, preferences or interests of those who hold office.”
At the same time, she emphasized that “respect” could not be used as an excuse for authoritarianism, or for stifling contrary voices. (And before you ask, no, I didn’t write or draft those words for her. Nobody writes CCM’s speeches but herself, and if you did, she’d very likely pepper your draft with corrections, as generations of her law clerks well know.)
That was particularly apt in UP, where the commencement ceremonies ended with the customary (by now) lightning rally, and while some slogans sounded rather tired, this year’s emphasis on fighting corruption gave it a particular urgency. UP Diliman’s graduation was taking place on the eve of the opening of the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte at the Senate, titanic confrontation on both sides of which prominent UP alumni were ranged.
The irony of the moment could hardly be overstated. Historically, UP has been known to be a bastion of dissent, a haven of nonconformists and rebels of all stripes and colors. I often cite the examples of then UP president Rafael Palma’s daughter Fe, who took part in the first documented student protest action in 1933, a boycott prompted by a tuition fee increase, and of President Manuel L. Quezon being lambasted for extravagance by a young hothead named Ferdinand Marcos.
Since the 1960s and 1970s, UP has acquired – inaccurately, I think – a reputation for being a breeding ground of communists, a convenient target for such Red-taggers as the NTF-ELCAC and a good excuse for its billions in funds. (Which reminds me: they should set up an NTF-ELCAC to seek and weed out the corrupt.) People forget that for every Joma Sison we produced a Juan Ponce Enrile; for every Benito Tiamzon a Fabian Ver; for every Lean Alejandro an Alan Peter Cayetano; for every Lorie Barros a Pia Cayetano.
As I emphasize whenever I can, even at the height of student activism, the radical Left was always in the minority in UP as it probably was elsewhere; we were just noisier, better organized, more determined and literally ready to die for our cause.
What the usual UP narrative also often ignores is the fact that many of us from the Left who survived the First Quarter Storm and martial law moved toward the liberal middle – indeed, some even to the far Right, becoming its ideologues, executors and apologists.
Surveying this year’s crop of bright and starry-eyed graduates, hundreds of them finishing with high honors, I wondered how many of them would, in the next 20 or 30 years, materially contribute to our people’s well-being, and also how many to its deterioration. I don’t think anyone goes to graduation with malice aforethought, but life has a strange way of shaping and testing character in a way that classrooms simply can’t. As we learned in martial-law prison, sometimes it’s the most seemingly inflexible who prove the most brittle and break.
At the ceremonies, pointed comments were made by some deans presenting their graduates about all the unfinished buildings on campus – the new Faculty Center has been a decade in the making, with the refurbishment of Abelardo Hall and the UP Main Library trailing closely behind. These delays can largely be traced to mismanagement under the old DPWH, a couple of projects possibly even tied to the Discayas.
But it struck me that the truly unfinished building to contemplate is the university itself, in constant reconstruction under pressure from AI, global rankings and the needs of the people it remains accountable to. Just having marked its 118th anniversary, it could yet be the Sagrada Familia of our national aspirations.
* * *
Email me at jose@dalisay.ph and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.