inside the thought bubbles!

repost uli!!!

an article by Butch Dalisay! read on!

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Being UP
PENMAN By Butch Dalisay
Monday, June 4, 2007
Daily Star

Don’t look now, but in just a couple of weeks, the University of the Philippines will be marking the start of its Centennial Year, culminating in the celebration of the Centennial itself on June 18, 2008. That will be a hundred years to the day Act No. 1870 was signed by Governor General Malcolm Forbes establishing “in the City of Manila, or at the point he may deem most convenient, a university which shall be known by the designation of ‘University of the Philippines,’ the same being organized as a corporation under that name.” A budget of P100,000 was set aside for that purpose.

By the time I was born in 1954, that same university had grown to become the country’s premier institution of higher learning, producing presidents, senators, justices, and any number of business and social leaders. But quite apart from the kind of celebrities who tend to hog the front and back pages, UP also graduated many thousands of people who contributed — perhaps more quietly but no less significantly — to the national life.
For sure, some of those contributions were shameful if not disastrous; universities offer learning, but can never guarantee goodness or wisdom. But the great majority of UP alumni — close to a quarter of a million of them, over this first century — have served their people and humanity well, from our poorest barangays to the farthest reaches of the planet, wherever Filipinos themselves have dwelt and prospered, which today is nearly all the globe, from Isabela to Iceland, from Kidapawan to Kenya.

Keeping track of those alumni and their achievements has been a formidable task.
When I became the UP System’s Vice President for Public Affairs in May 2003, one of the tasks I realized I’d inherited was being nominally in charge of alumni affairs. I say “nominally” because the day-to-day administration of this concern fell to the Director of the Office of Alumni Relations — usually some indefatigably patient and unsinkably optimistic lady professor with the charm of a kitten and the tenacity of a pit bull.

On my first visit to the OAR, I discovered that — while most alumni records have since been computerized — we still kept 3” x 5” index cards on all the alumni known to us, boxes and boxes of them filling a whole wall. One of them, I was happy to see, was my mother’s: Emilia A. Yap of Sta. Fe, Romblon, BSEEd. 1956. (She should have graduated with her batchmates of 1953, but had to pause to deliver and nurse a certain baby — thankfully.) As I grew up, that mother of mine would play a 78 rpm record of UP Beloved flipsided by Push On, UP at least once a week — more than broadly hinting that I could go to any college I wanted when I grew up, as long as these were its sacred hymns. The teacher Emilia Yap Dalisay never quite attained the same degree of professional success as, say, the lawyer Juan Ponce Enrile and the playwright Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, who appeared with her in the same 1953 Philippinensian yearbook. Indeed, it would be the labor of bringing up five children and doing the housework of her time — my father never finished college, but did what he could — that abraded the gold class ring she still wears proudly, eventually wearing down the sharp details to a dull sheen. When I graduated from UP in 1984 — after 14 years as a vagrant student — no one was happier and prouder than her. All that music had clearly worked.

But for all her obscurity and all those years of struggle — including working as a postal clerk for a minimum wage — she carried herself like the UP alumna she was: the provincial girl who had seen not just Manila but the world through her studies, who learned how to think for herself and to say “No” to patently wrong and stupid notions, to refuse bribes that would have diminished her character, and to do good deeds for others because they were the right thing to do.

I can’t help thinking of my mother when I think of “UP alumni” in general, because she’s probably more representative of more of these UP alumni than the super-achievers we normally — and logically — sing the praises of, especially during major anniversaries. And what bigger one can there be than the Centennial, this long-awaited summation of all the things we are, and all the things we mean?

A thick book won’t be enough to detail the individual accomplishments of even just the 100 most outstanding alumni to have come out of not just Diliman, Los Baños, and Padre Faura, but of the System’s other campuses as well. I’m sure that over the next 12 months, such illustrious figures will emerge or be celebrated, as they should.

But let me take this opportunity today to write in praise of the unheralded, the common, and those long departed and forgotten — those who also served their university and country in their own quiet ways. Let me also praise our alumni as a whole — as a body of men and women constantly refreshed by young blood and fresh minds, but who have also shown a constancy of capacity, including the rare ability to think and to come together on issues of
the most urgent import, even when the nation itself could not. That constancy has been maintained by generations of both militancy and cooperation, of informed involvement in the affairs of both the university and the larger society of which it is a part.

Almost from the very beginning — since 1916, when Pablo Lorenzo of Law Class 1914 became the first alumni regent — UP alumni have sought a voice in the university’s affairs.
Occasionally that voice has been a strident one — it seems to be the popular misimpression that all UP students and professors can do is rant and rebel — but the alumni have also shown a tremendous generosity of spirit over the years, a willingness to work with all for the common good. During the Depression years, when UP’s finances fell so low that President Rafael Palma volunteered to have his annual salary cut from P18,000 to P12,000, UP alumni responded warmly to his idea of a P6 contribution from every UP graduate as a membership fee for the UP Alumni Association and its projects; one of those projects was a small press that eventually became the University Press. During the War, the UPAA supported the resistance and the families of those who fought. Inside the prison camp in Capas, the UPAA planted a Quezon memorial tree; after the War, it opened its Alumni House to released but homeless POWs and set up the Marina Institute to provide skills training to these people and to others in need of work. The alumni — including those in the United States — also spearheaded the rebuilding of the UP Library’s ravaged collections, so that by 1948, these could offer 200,000 books and periodicals once again to their users.

Also after the War, President Jorge Bocobo recognized the value of the alumni’s intellectual contributions by establishing an Alumni Institute and building an Alumni Hall so professors and alumni could brainstorm on the question of bring the university closer to the community. (Interestingly, however, Bocobo pointedly refused P5,000 that the UP Cebu alumni had raised to save their beleaguered college because the money had come from sweepstakes, and Bocobo huffed that “…the university would never accept a single centavo raised in this way.”)
There were quite a few other times when the UP administration and the alumni saw things differently, and said so. When President Bienvenido Gonzalez first broached the idea of moving UP from Padre Faura to (good heavens) Diliman, the alumni led by future President Salvador P. Lopez railed against his “isolationist indifference” and UP’s retreat into an “ivory tower.” Sometimes the contretemps involved the other President — the presumably bigger one. When Elpidio Quirino — not one of Gonzalez’s favorite persons — became the President of the Republic and demanded the courtesy resignations of all top government officials, Gonzalez refused to submit his. When the College of Law ordered cases of beer to honor its most prominent alumni, including President Quirino, Gonzalez halted the delivery and ordered the beer truck off the campus.

Fortunately, the alumni’s relations with their alma mater have much more often been happier. When UP celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 1958 — coinciding with Vicente Sinco’s assumption of the presidency — the alumni led in the festivities that culminated in the installation of what would become UP’s undying symbol, the bronze Oblation. In 1983, for the UP’s Diamond Jubilee, UP alumni here and abroad responded so enthusiastically to President Edgardo Angara’s fundraising appeal that the Diamond Jubilee Fund overshot its target of P75 million to reach P87 million. But as important as the material contributions of UP alumni are to the university and the nation, something always reminds us that it’s never just about money. (Money-making, in any case, has never been UP’s strong suit.)