It must be the stormy weather, and all the bad news we’ve been having these past few weeks. Nearly everyone I’ve been speaking with agrees that a general malaise seems to have befallen these islands, no thanks to the entry of some dubious characters into the Senate (not to mention the government), the antics of the Abu Sayyaf, the antics of the pursuers of the Abu Sayyaf, and the antics of the Abu Sayyaf’s spiritual brethren (i.e., urban hoodlums and kidnap syndicates) right here in the city. Not too long ago, someone got kidnapped right on campus – and not just anywhere on campus, either, but practically at the doorstep of the College of Law. It turned out that she wasn’t a UP student, but she might as well have been (considering how many Mercedes-Benzes turn up at the student parking lot these days, some of them trailed by another carful of bodyguards).
Unlike our more upscale wards, we UP professors don’t have to worry too much about being kidnapped – not with our salaries and our engaging dispositions. Imagine the aggravation of a kidnapper who abducts a Chinese-looking UP professor, mistaking him or her for a dressed-down hopia magnate, only to be lectured on "Modernist Collage in Kubrick’s Mise en Scene," plus a juicy tidbit of gossip or two about the infighting in, say, the history department, all the way to the safehouse.
We had guests over for lunch a few days ago – Profs. John Holder and Kokkeong Wong, visiting from St. Norbert College in the United States. They’d flown in between a departing typhoon and an incoming one, with a volcano exploding somewhere in a corner. "A fine pair you’d make in this country right now," we greeted the American and the Malaysian, who knew all too well what we meant. They grinned, but even John – a scholar of Buddhist philosophy who’s married to a Filipina and who speaks perfect Tagalog – admitted sensing a palpable shift in the wind, a darkening in the public mood.
I don’t think it’s so much hopelessness as helplessness that we feel. The winds are roiling above your head and you can’t do a thing about them, except to duck for cover and pray for all the ugliness to pass. You like to think of the university and its sylvan campus as a refuge from all that, but the illusion can go only so far, especially when you have to worry about the the rent and the electricity and the price of gas at the pump.
But don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to go off somewhere. A little depression doesn’t mean abject surrender, and crisis or not, a little depression has always come with the academic life. It’s healthy; I’d be very wary of a thoroughly cheerful teacher, if I were you, especially these days; that can only mean that he or she has a shamelessly wealthy spouse, or hasn’t been reading the papers.
Perhaps the only response people in our situation can make to this creeping malaise is neither cockeyed idealism nor sullen withdrawal nor frothy rage, but irony of the sweetest-sourest kind, the kind that can whine at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as well as or better than the next fellow, while maintaining one’s composure long enough to deliver that lecture on "Exile and Eden in the Filipino-American Short Story" with the proper ardor and, indeed, the requisite transcendence. The university may be doing what it can to improve our lot (although, in the eyes of many, it can always do more), but much of the rest can only come from within, in a refusal to be diminished or defeated by economics or politics alone.
At a recent meeting during which some UP professors were consulted about the questions we should be asking of each other to establish our place in contemporary Philippine society and in the scheme of things to come, I suggested that one useful pair of questions to raise – beyond the usual quantitative measures – would be (1) "What’s keeping us in UP?" and "(2) What’s driving us away from UP?" My own short answers would probably be: (1) The trees; the students; the company of my colleagues; and (2) The salary; the students; and, yup, the company of my colleagues. And then again I stay on for sentimental reasons, because it’s what my parents would have expected me to do.
If your folks were anything like mine, you would’ve grown up thinking that there was no ambition more worth pursuing than to become a student of the University of the Philippines. My mother – the youngest of a brood of 13 and the only one favored enough to be sent to the city for a college degree – made sure that I would follow in her footsteps by playing, week in and week out, a 78 rpm record that had UP Beloved on one side and Push On, UP on the other.
Her UP class ring (BSE, 1952) would eventually be worn smooth by years of housework, and she would yield her own career to the claims of wifehood and motherhood, but her diploma held pride of place among her possessions, luminous and majestic in its Gothic script, like a prize of superlative virtue and incalculable value. Her graduation yearbook, the Philippinensian, opened more mysteries (as did that other mainstay of our slender shelves, the Modern Medical Counsellor).
My awe of UP was reinforced by trips to my uncle’s place in Balara, where the old man tended a lush vegetable garden, and otherwise held court in the open street with his trademark bottle of cheap Chinese wine. "Go with the wise," my uncle intoned through the pungent Si Hoc Tong haze, "and you will be wise." Mostly we took the Halili Transit bus to Diliman for an eye-searing dip in the heavily chlorinated pools of the Balara Filtration Plant, and a picnic afterwards on the lawn or beneath the ornate iron roofs of the adjoining pavillions. But I never went to UP without glancing at the Oblation and dreaming, more than idly, of belonging to the place for longer than a romp in the Sunken Garden.
It took many more years and some detours, but that dream came true, and I graduated with my AB English degree in 1984 – 14 years after I received my student number (one of those things that mark you forever as a UP stude from a certain batch, and which you never forget: mine was 70-02858); I was 30 years old; my parents were in the audience, and the ceremony took five hours but nobody complained. When they – we – sang UP Naming Mahal (the old UP Beloved, updated for the new temper of the times), we closed a circle that had been running round that amphitheater for a good 25 years.
When I applied to teach I began another circle, and that one’s still far from completion.
Kalayaan College was established by former UP President Jose V. Abueva to take in students who might otherwise have gone to UP, Ateneo, Miriam College, and such other institutions in the same geographical and academic range. KC curricula are patterned after UP’s, with an emphasis on the liberal arts and sciences (or what we call "general education"), and a memorandum of agreement with UP allows UP faculty to teach at Kalayaan. Several bachelor’s degree courses are immediately on offer, for studies in Literature, Public Administration, Secondary Education, and Early Childhood Care and Development. A two-year associate program in Computer Technology is also available, along with other short-term courses.
KC has some of UP’s most accomplished names on its roster, including Profs. Thelma Kintanar, Gonzalo Jurado, Virginia Cariño, Olivia Domingo, Gemino Abad, Erlinda Echanis, Jose Endriga, and Napoleon Abueva. Ceramist Lanelle Abueva Fernando and performing artist Monique Wilson are also associated with KC. Some of these people were my own best teachers and it’s good to see them sharing their expertise elsewhere.
KC is now serving an initial batch of 75 students. If you feel like joining them, or sending your son or daughter to what I’m sure will very quickly become a school of choice, call 998-17-24 or e-mail the college at kalayaan@impactnet.com.