400 and counting

The first two months of 2011 have sped by so fast that I missed writing about a whole bunch of events. Last Jan. 27, a friend of mine, Ramon Orlina (I had worked with him on several projects in Singapore in the 1980s), invited me to the unveiling of his largest sculpture: the Quattromondial monument, marking the University of Santo Tomas’s 400 years of existence in Manila.

The date was actually also his birthday and Ramon always knows how to celebrate. Mon saved on the fireworks as the night sky above the UST campus was flooded with multi-colored sparklers.

The Sampaloc campus of the UST is an old Manila landmark, although not as old as everybody imagines. The campus moved there in the 1920s from its original campus in the Intramuros. The institution, however, is very old, having been established in 1611, which makes it 30 years older than Harvard! And so Ramon will not complain and to set the record straight — he is about 350 years younger than his alma mater.

Oldest in the east

UST produces fine priests, doctors and engineers, among other professions in its 24-hectare campus.

Ransacking though my archives of old pictures and magazines, I came across a 50-year-old article on the UST printed in Asia magazine (the largest circulated weekend magazine in Asia in the 1960s — with close to half a million copies).

The UST was, in fact, the cover story. The title of the piece was “Oldest in the East.” The subhead read: “Sto. Tomas in Manila has been teaching Philippine elite for three centuries.”

Excerpts from the piece give a glimpse of the university’s colorful past:

“Manila’s University of Santo Tomas is the oldest in the East. It was founded by Spanish Dominican missionaries — men of the Catholic Church’s famed Order of Preachers — in 1611, which makes it 30 years older than Harvard and a full century older than Yale. Classes began at Sto. Tomas in 1619 and have gone on continuously, except for two interruptions (during the Revolutionary War of 1898-1899 and the Pacific War of 1942-1945) through four changes of government in the Philippines.

“Named after St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican theologian (1225-1274), the university is the only one remaining among 34 universities the order broadcast through Spain and its possessions in both hemispheres in the 16th and the 17th century. Sto. Tomas was affiliated with the University of Mexico, whose statutes it adopted bodily. Until the end of the Spanish regime, the university dominated educational life in the country. Its rector was given the power to supervise education in the colony, and Sto. Tomas was the only institution empowered to confer academic degrees.

UST coeds were segregated from boys in classes and even in corridors!

“The Spanish-time principally or town elite sent its sons to Sto. Tomas as a matter of course. Several generations of Philippine leaders were Dominican-bred.

“These include the martyred priest Jose Burgos, the National Hero Jose Rizal and President Manuel L. Quezon, Sergio Osmeña and Claro M. Recto of a later period. (The current president at the time of the article) President Diosdado Macapagal obtained three degrees, two of them doctorates, from Sto. Tomas; he lectured to graduate classes on law and economics until a few years ago.

“Like all the other universities in the metropolitan centre at Manila, however, Sto. Tomas has steadily broadened its base. Having moved out of its ancient site in the Walled City as early as the end of the 1920s, Sto. Tomas today has 15 buildings and an enrolment of 30,000 students — the population of an average Filipino town — in a large campus in Sampaloc district.”

War and earthquake-proof

 “The university’s earthquake-proof main building, erected a generation ago (by Spanish Dominican engineer Fray Roque Ruaño) and now decked with heroic statues of classical and church thinkers (by the Italian sculptor Francesco Monti), is a Manila landmark. Tourists are still taken to see where some 5,000 Allied civilians were interned during the Pacific War.

“Conservatism and modernity continue to be intermingled in academic life. Rizal’s sharp satire of the dogma and rote, which characterized some classroom teaching in the 1880s, is not entirely irrelevant at Sto. Tomas even today. The faculty of medicine is one of the finest in the Philippines; and Sto. Tomas savants do fine path-breaking work in surgery and the natural sciences. But for the most part, the old university is being superseded in its leading role in the education of the Philippine elite by much younger and much more aggressive universities. Its atmosphere seems one of comfortable middle age. The Spanish Dominicans who still run its day-to-day affairs seem content to stay out of the keen competition for enrolment and prestige in an era of educational boom.”

The deans of UST’s 15 colleges circa 1960s pose in front of the centuries arch.

The article went on to state that Manila (in the early ‘60s) had five major universities with a total enrolment over 120,000, not counting the sizeable populations of the various (other smaller) colleges in what is still known as the University Belt.

The article continues, “There are fairly large universities in the Visayas; and a state university …in the predominantly Muslim region of Mindanao. The expansion of facilities for higher education in the Philippines after the Pacific War has been the source of national pride and scandal. ‘Diploma mills’ — fly-by-night colleges with only the crudest credentials — flourished, catering to a thirst among the country’s young for respectability and the security of a college degree.”

The article concludes that “the educational system the Americans set up provided a base of literacy broader than was laid by the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in Indochina or even the British in (their colonies). This may serve to explain not only the superficial ‘Americanization’ of urbanized Filipinos but also the healthy growth of representative institutions and the relative ease with which the Philippines is managing the economic and cultural changes of industrialization.”

The article was accompanied by wonderful images taken by the master of Philippine photography Dick Baldovino. In this article I include other images from my collection: a pre-war postcard and an aerial panorama of the campus and Sampaloc.

Of course, much has changed in the last 50 years, the UST has kept and enhanced its status as one of the country’s leading universities. Its College of Architecture is an acknowledged fountainhead of architectural greats that include National Artists in Architecture Leandro Locsin and IP Santos, along with the likes of current icons Bobby Mañosa, Meloy Casas, Bong Recio, Jun Palafox, as well as those who moved to make a name for themselves in the arts like Ed Castrillo and Ramon Orlina.

Legacy and sustainability: The next 400 years

The strong architectural heritage of the campus is a factor that produced these greats. To celebrate this legacy and the university’s 400th anniversary, the National Museum of the Philippines has named today four sites there as “National Cultural Treasures.”

The UST campus 50 years ago shows it was at the fringe of the city, now it is the only green left in the district.

These include the green open campus grounds, the earthquake-proof Main Building, the elegant Central Seminary and the historic Arch of the Centuries (a remnant from the original complex at the Intramuros).

A handful of universities in the metropolis are, in fact, stewards of the few green open spaces left. It is important to give these legacies of physical space, as well as iconic architecture, as great a value as the education provided by these institutions. The campus plans and landscape architecture of these campus serve to give pedigree and pedagogy that will properly frame the enlightenment of Filipino youth.

We do hope that the various campuses in the metropolis that are celebrating their various anniversaries; La Salle with its 100th, the Ateneo with its 150th (last year), and even the UP (with its 100th a few years back), ensure that the learning environments they provide their students are sustainable, green and fresh.

The pursuit of knowledge is a never-ending task. Four centuries of formal education in the Philippines (although there probably was some form of education prior to colonization) have made us realize that we must all continue to learn from the past, that our present condition can always be improved and that the future lies in how well we use knowledge for the common good.

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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com. There will be an event today in Intramuros: Transitio1945, a memorial to a Manila that was and a celebration of Manila that will be from 4:30 p.m. in front of the Manila Cathedral. Please contact Carlos Celdran at carlosceldran.com.