Passion For Reason
This pecking order among schools
By Raul Pangalangan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:30:00 07/18/2008
Filed Under: Education, Schools
THE SUPREME COURT RECENTLY REPRImanded a judge for telling a lawyer, upon learning that he didn’t share the judge’s alma mater: “Then you’re not from UP. Then you cannot equate yourself to me because there is a saying and I know this … not all law schools are created equal, not all lawyers are created equal despite what the Supreme Being [said] that we all are created equal ….”
I have read the Supreme Court resolution disciplining the judge, including transcripts from the verbal exchange. The lawyer had asked the judge to inhibit himself and to recuse himself from the case, with “indiscreet” imputations of bribery, apparently without any evidence. That may have been cause enough to hold the lawyer in contempt, the Supreme Court said, but the judge erred when he lapsed into the language of conceit and condescension, “a supercilious legal and personal discourse.”
I am all too familiar with the patriotic zeal of the graduates of Malcolm Hall. I hear it often enough in the building where I work regularly, namely, Malcolm Hall, Filipino heartland of what Holmes called “teaching law in the grand manner.” And while I stand by that ideal, I also know that it is so easy to slide from being grand to merely being grandiose.
There are two issues here. The first is about hierarchy: “My school is better/classier/more profound than yours.” The second is about loyalty: “… And make no mistake about it, I will hammer it into your head.”
The first problem I find easier to deal with. There are objective global standards for ranking universities: whether the faculty publish refereed research, whether they have advanced degrees, the “no-show” ratio between students admitted and those who actually enroll, the student-faculty ratio in classrooms, etc. (Faculty salaries are included, but rankings in government licensing exams don’t figure in international surveys.) In these global ratings, UP has ranked first in the nation.
But the pecking order is actually irrelevant in two ways. One, the real question is what school is best for a particular student. It is the issue of the “fit” between the school and the student, his learning style, career plans and, for that matter, the luck of the draw when he chooses his teachers, his major, or his job. In other words, the hierarchy is meaningless when the true test is the school’s impact on the student’s life. That is why I have seen graduates from schools all over Manila and in the provinces as well, who can stand shoulder to shoulder with their competition in the elite schools. There are diplomas that cannot do justice to their graduates, and there are graduates who do too much justice to their diplomas.
Then there is the question of “nexus”, on whether the student has bragging rights, the “K” that flows from admission and survivorship. I have always disputed the gatekeeper function of admissions exams. I love that cartoon where a student gets his test results, and the admissions officer says: “The results of your aptitude tests show that you have an aptitude for taking aptitude tests.” As for survivorship, the Pinoy way of teaching requires more diligence than genius. As the saying goes, “Daig ng masinop ang magaling”—yet nobody ever won a Nobel for merely being “masinop.”
The second problem about school loyalty is a bit more touchy. I am not one for noisy cheers and have rarely shouted myself hoarse in a stadium—except that is, when my sons compete in the UAAP. (And you should see me cheer, cajole, pray and plead with the heavens: my eldest won a UAAP gold in judo in 2006, my second captains his varsity team this year, and he and the third have just returned from an international tournament in Korea.)
When fellow Inquirer columnist Rina Jimenez-David wrote about the UAAP cheer by the high-class schools: “Tuition n’yo, Allowance lang namin!”, I thought to myself: If that taunt were ever to be made against UP, it would have been merely a statement of fact. Res ipsa loquitur. (And in which case, I am told, the standard UP retort is: “Finals n’yo, quiz lang namin!”)
School loyalties are actually the modernized version of feudal allegiances, and indeed these fealties at some point assume a Mafia-type readiness to conspire and sabotage whoever is “the enemy” at a given moment. I have heard of schools being shamelessly lenient with their star students—for academic, disciplinary, moral, even sexual transgressions—in the quest for medals. It is so feudal indeed that, on the other hand, the poor but ambitious students and their parents see the upper-class school emblems as signs of upward mobility, their entrée into the perfumed world of the rich and famous. Rabid school allegiances are the refuge of the insecure, from which the timid draw confidence and the illusion of panache.
There is one saving grace though. School loyalties foster competition, that bracing feeling, the surge of adrenalin, the rush of the moment, and that can lead to an outpouring of generosity (e.g., new scholarships), even of excellence and achievement. My worry is the flipside of drawing our sense of community so narrowly around parochial and contrived constituencies that we fail to be truly catholic (in its original sense of “universal”) and we end up with total love for those within the circle, and total war to those outside.
My father took his pre-law at UP (which he attended right after World War II ended), his law at Ateneo (cum laude with Class ’52, law review chair and Prefect of the Sodality) and his master of laws from Michigan (as a Fulbright scholar). From him I learned in the grandest manner of them all, and if you ask me which school taught him best, I say: Look to the man and not to the school.
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