A pageant of presidents
Lest I may have given the impression in last week’s piece on UP presidents that Jorge Bocobo was little more than a killjoy, let me add that Bocobo was also a visionary who believed that the university community should immerse itself in “the daily life of the masses,” and who urged professors to lecture in public high schools and students to assist in adult education. He also set up an Information Service that government officials could tap into if they needed data for policymaking.
When Bocobo moved on to become Secretary of Public Instruction in 1939, he was replaced by Agriculture Dean Bienvenido Gonzalez, whose father Joaquin had been the first rector of UP’s progenitor, the Universidad Literaria de Filipinas. Gonzalez would serve for two terms that straddled the war, and when he left in 1951 — practically forced out of office by President Elpidio Quirino — it was over his vigorous defense of academic freedom. Former PGH director Antonio G. Sison served briefly as president during the Japanese Occupation; not surprisingly, Sison kept the PGH going in the last and worst days of the war.
It was during Gonzalez’s second term that UP moved to its new campus in Diliman, then a forested area that was part of what was known as the “Mariquina Estate” owned by the Tuasons. In a poll taken of UP students before the war, almost 85 percent rejected the idea of moving to this “rainforest teeming with snakes, wild pigs, lizards, monkeys, and a huge swarm of mosquitoes.”
Gonzalez was replaced at the helm of UP by Vidal A. Tan, a Renaissance man whose first degree was in the liberal arts before he turned to science and mathematics. Under Tan, UP’s liberal atmosphere flourished, and the ’50s became another golden age of learning, debate, and artistic productivity for UP. To the everlasting gratitude of the UP faculty, Tan abolished the daily time record (DTR), replacing it with the monthly form we now sign “Upon my honor…” He also instituted study privileges for the children of UP personnel. Worn down by political intramurals, Tan retired in 1956, and Enrique Virata took over as acting president. It would take more than 21 months and 30 postponements to find a permanent replacement for Tan, as the regents bickered among themselves. In the end it took no more than four minutes and one balloting to elect law Dean Vicente G. Sinco as Tan’s successor.
The authoritarian Sinco would meet his match in such troublesome students as Homobono Adaza, who was expelled for maligning the regents in the Collegian, and of whom Sinco would say that “To graduate Adaza is to graduate criminals, communists, bandits, and traitors.” At the same time, however, Sinco democratized admission, and can be credited for establishing UP’s trademark general education curriculum. Sinco was also known to drop in unannounced on random classes and to take part in class discussions.
Sinco’s replacement in 1962 came in a rather unorthodox way: President Diosdado Macapagal had openly indicated his preference for the diplomat, general, and former UP English professor Carlos P. Romulo, predictably sparking opposition from many who saw it as another instance of Palace meddling in UP affairs. Macapagal got his wish anyway: by a 9-2 vote, the BOR “unanimously” elected Romulo (the BOR has a tradition of considering all such key votes unanimous after the fact), who was inaugurated in April 1963 to stirring choral music composed by Eliseo Pajaro, who used as his motif Romulo’s own words: “The university is a citadel of truth; let no one make of it anything else.”
Though known and sometimes derided for being unabashedly pro-American, Romulo saw himself as also a fervent nationalist, and instituted flag ceremonies on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons, and had the UP ROTC wear the rayadillo uniforms the UP honor guard still uses today. Romulo’s liberalism would be challenged by students and young faculty members like Jose Ma. Sison who were already exploring more radical solutions to the nation’s ills. As fraught with ideological tension as Romulo’s presidency was, it was also a time when some of UP’s most important new institutions were established, among them the Asian Center, the Department of Filipino and Philippine Studies, the University Press, the International House, and the UP Computer Center.
In April 1968, 70 years old and recently widowed, CPR took his leave and told the regents he was moving on, pleased with what he had been able to achieve.” I bow out, as it were,” he said, “within full sight and hearing of the throb and hum of an academic machine in high gear, a power plant generating that force, that electricity, which brings light to every dark corner and cranny of our lives.”
Romulo was succeeded by another diplomat, Salvador P. Lopez, who however was an avowed socialist, at least in his literary leanings. Lopez’s assumption of the presidency was promptly greeted by student strikes in Diliman and Los Baños, and ironically it took the intervention of Lopez’s Upsilon “brod,” President Marcos, to meet some of the student demands for better facilities (some other demands, like the abolition of exams, did not fare so well).
Lopez would lead UP through its most turbulent period, one now remembered by its middle-aged veterans as the First Quarter Storm. Events both within and outside the university would mark UP indelibly as the bastion of the Left, the sworn antagonist of US imperialism, the Vietnam War, the Marcos regime, and everything they were associated with. In December 1969, the visit of American Vice President Spiro Agnew provoked a protest which resulted in the mauling and brief jailing of three UP students — Rene Ciria-Cruz, Jorge Sibal, and Gary Olivar. A month later, thousands of students would mass outside Congress as Marcos delivered his State of the Nation Address, and for the next few days and weeks, a virtual war would be fought on Manila’s streets between the police and student protesters.
On January 29, 1970, Lopez led 16 faculty members and four students to Malacañang to meet personally with Marcos to present their “Declaration of Concern.” Instead, Marcos read out to them the dossier of what he implied was a Communist on the UP faculty, who also happened to be in the delegation: Francisco Nemenzo Jr. who himself would become UP president about 30 years later. As it happened, Lopez bowed out when his six-year term ended in 1975, and was replaced by Onofre D. Corpuz.
And here is where I’ll end this quick overview of UP’s earlier presidents and their presidencies, having entered UP myself as a callow freshman in October 1970 — yes, in the second semester, a one-time option offered to some of us who wanted to graduate earlier out of high school.
Decades later, as a vice president, I got the chance to look around the UP president’s office and noticed a little back room with a simple cot behind the president’s desk. Diliman’s helmsmen must have found that facility useful at one point or other in their uneasy and unenviable lives.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
