‘Most Dazzling Award’

How does someone like Vice President Jejomar Binay get the 2011 “Most Distinguished Alumnus” award from the UP Alumni Association (UPAA)? Therein lies a sorry tale involving a law dean’s purported wish to mark the 100th anniversary of the UP College of Law by ensuring that a law alumnus gets the prestigious award, an undiscerning law alumni association, a UPAA board conveniently headed by a law alumna who was willing and able to throw the board’s own rules out of the window, a generous (P2 million) contribution to the UPAA, and, like a constant refrain, the irresistible lure of the possible benefits that come with pandering (brown-nosing?) to the politically powerful – the goodwill and the patronage.

Want to get the details?  Read on and weep.

Start with reading the “General Information and Guidelines for the UPAA Alumni Awards 2011” as posted in the UPAA website (as of Feb. 15, 2011). And it will not escape your attention that the “Most Distinguished Alumnus/Alumna” Award (MDA) is not among the award categories. What are listed are the “UP Distinguished Alumni” awards for various “thematic” categories (e.g., public service and good governance, poverty alleviation and human development, culture and the arts), the “UP Distinguished Service” awards, and UP Alumni Family awards (to families with alumni spanning at least three successive generations). No MDA.

Could the non-inclusion of the latter category have been an oversight? After all, such a distinction has been awarded over the years, up to at least 2008 (the last recipient being Chief Justice Renato Puno during the UP Centennial celebrations). The answer is “No.” It turns out that the current UPAA Board, which took office on July 2009, and was headed by Alfredo Pascual until he ran for UP president (whereupon Gladys Tiongco replaced him), apparently decided to do away with the MDAs altogether. The reason, again apparently, being that it is very hard to choose the primus inter pares, particularly if the pares are involved in very diverse activities in the first place. Just as it is very hard to choose what is the best fruit among langka, chico, guava, banana, santol, atis, etc.  So it was decided that the choices would be limited to the best among the langka, the best among the chicos, the best among the guavas, etc. At least that was the metaphor that was used when the rationale for giving up the MDAs was explained to me.

Whether we agree or disagree with that reasoning is actually beside the point. The point is that the UPAA Board did not intend to give an MDA, and it did not call for nominations for that award in its posted announcement.

Which gives rise, naturally, to the question:  If the UPAA did not intend to give the MDA award, how did it come to be that on June 10, or thereabouts, the announcement that Vice President Binay had won the award was made? Other questions also come to the fore: If there was no call for nominees to the award, and nominations still came, how many such nominations were submitted, i.e., how large was the pool of nominees from which Binay was chosen? And if the UPAA decided, in the middle of the selection process, to re-create the category that it had withdrawn, when did it send out a call or an announcement to that effect, so that the alumni and alumni chapters could submit their own nominees?

Answering the last question first, there apparently was no subsequent call for nominees for the now-included MDA award – the UPAA website shows no announcements to that effect. The answer to the second-to-the last question, which was provided by a member of the UPAA Board to me only yesterday, was that there were no other nominees. Vice President Binay constituted a nominee pool of one.

The answer to the first question (i.e., how come the award was made?) comes from what I consider to be an unimpeachable source, and I quote the text verbatim: “Law alumni wanted a law grad for their 100 years celebration. Law dean leonin (sic) nominated him together with the law alumni assn. Choice could have been worst (sic) Johnny Enrile.”

I shared this and all the rest of the above information with my fellow UPAA Alumni Council members at yesterday’s annual meeting.  It is significant to note that UPAA president Gladys Tiongco, presiding, did not deny the veracity of the text message. What she did was to accept full responsibility for the decision.

I also noted the four criteria – Service Orientation, Leadership, Impact and Integrity—for evaluating nominees.  The leadership criterion requires that the nominee “has demonstrated effective and inspiring personal leadership …. i.e., achievements can be attributed more to the person than to the official position/job/title she/he has held.” The integrity criterion states: “there is no serious concern about, or challenge to, the nominee’s personal integrity.”  Obviously the question is: were these criteria applied at all to the sole MDA nominee? The answer has to be equally obvious.

I invited my fellow alumni and fellow UP faculty members present to ponder on the blatant, unrepentant, what-are-we-in-power-for,  we-are-exempt-from-our-own rules attitude of the alumni governing body. Doesn’t it smack too much of a typical politician’s attitude?

That kind of decision-making has no place whatsoever in UP, where honor and excellence (honor first) are our raisons d’etre. The lesson is clear:  we should not talk the talk (tell government what it is doing wrong) unless we ourselves can walk the walk (practice what we preach).