Why we stay

Last Thursday, the University of the Philippines’ board of regents appointed me chancellor of UP Diliman, the flagship campus, and although my term did not officially start until March 2, I had to hit the ground running, including arranging for transfers of responsibilities from being a college dean.  I’m glad to say, too, that both in UP and the Inquirer, I have been given the go-signal to continue doing this column, thanks in part to readers who wrote in to convince me to continue.

Amid all the hustle and bustle, I have paused many times to wonder, “How did I get into all this?” I became especially introspective last Saturday, when I had to attend two activities.

The first was a lunch hosted by the UP president for the Oblation scholars, the top 50 UPCAT (UP College Admissions Test) qualifiers. The second was an open house at the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy (CSSP) for some 120 UPCAT passers and their parents.

Both activities were meant to honor the passers and, just as importantly, to convince them to say yes to UP. Although it is very difficult getting into UP—in the last UPCAT only 16 percent of the almost 83,000 examinees qualified for admission—there are many passers who decide not to enroll.

Stereotypes and realities

At the reception for the Oblation scholars, I thought about my own experience way, way back in 1969, when I did pass UP’s entrance exam but enrolled instead at the other good school (Ateneo), mainly because of my parents’ fears that UP would turn me communist, atheist, and a sex maniac, in no particular order of fear. I have to say those images are stereotypes.

So I stayed on with the Jesuits, but got my way in my junior year, managing to convince my parents to let me take veterinary medicine, with UP having the most convenient location. (There were only three vet schools in our time—UP, Araneta University in Caloocan, and a university in Samar.)

The first day I got home from school, I told my parents I wanted to go back to Ateneo. The toilets at UP were dirty, there was no toilet paper, the classrooms were hot, and people laughed when I talked in English.

This time my parents were the ones who urged me to be patient, to stay on, but with a twist: “You chose UP. You stay and prove your decision was right.”

And stay I did, learning to love UP because I had classmates from all walks of life, from all over the Philippines. I learned to appreciate the sounds of our many languages, the stories of diverse lives. I learned to empathize with classmates worried about paying tuition, or rent in the boarding house.

A few years after graduation I went back to UP to teach. Again, there were many difficult times when I wondered if I should leave. My father’s friends—Chinese businessmen mainly—actually told me I was “gong” (stupid) to continue teaching when I could go into business, open a piggery, for example. I would politely explain I was a vegetarian, which of course freaked them out even more.

My high school classmates felt the same way, arguing that if I did want to teach, why not do so part-time and in schools that had higher pay? At times, exasperated, I would ask them: “Who would teach your children if there weren’t gong people like myself staying on in schools?”

I will be honest and say there were times when I did want to leave. UP suffers from a government culture that sometimes encourages the mean and the unkind. After I became dean, I was once browsing through my academic folder and was shocked to find out what superiors had done to block my promotions, and requests for leaves.

When I tell friends about what I discovered in my files, the usual response is that now I can get back at the mean-spirited. And I always reply, “Of course not. I’m staying on to make sure no one—student, faculty, or staff—will ever have to go through the ordeal I went through.”

I did have many colleagues who left, in exasperation. I stayed because it was good to stay. The mean-spirited are a tiny minority. There are many more fellow faculty, and students, with all kinds of personalities, with diverse forms of knowledge, coming together for tournaments of ideas. It’s hard to describe the joys of engaging people, of throwing ideas into the air and watching fellow faculty, and students, reaching out to catch those ideas and transform them into concrete outputs: an article, a book, an artistic work, a performance, projects that transform society.

Imagination

Just yesterday morning I attended the opening of “Haraya,” featuring the best work of our architecture students. If I didn’t have more appointments I would have stayed the whole day with these “imagineers.” The word haraya means imagination, and that’s what drives institutions of learning like UP. (I’ll write about haraya in a future column.)

As chancellor, I intend to show how indispensable “imagineers” are—social scientists and people in the arts and humanities, the creative professions, architecture being paramount—for improving the quality of people’s lives and creating spaces where people can thrive, and grow.

We’ve been doing that for years in UP with the most limited of resources, which we are able to stretch because we have so many bright faculty and students. Yet there are many times, too, seeing how our students live day to day, when I want to go up to them and say, “You deserve more, so much more.”

At the CSSP open house, I was particularly touched by young Miguel, one of the UPCAT passers for the social sciences. Miguel has a neurological disorder which severely limits his movement. His parents said that he was determined to study in UP and they asked about access for the differently abled. They were not the first parents to have asked; two years earlier I met with a mother who had a similar problem for her daughter, and we arranged for her to be able to drive up as close to the entrance as possible, and then to be assisted.

It will be more difficult with Miguel because his movement is even more limited, but I have promised, for now, that we will find ways to let him move around a bit more easily, even if it means guards and utilities people carrying him up the stairs. When Palma Hall was built more than 60 years ago, a shaft was provided but not an elevator, and it was ironic that as we talked, with Miguel giving a smile that will brighten anyone’s day, I realized that the shaft was right in front of us.

My column today is not just about UP but about believing in what we do, about staying on—it does not have to be in UP—with kindred spirits sustaining us through courage and a generosity of spirit.

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