An open door

Afew weekends ago, the traffic was tied up in knots around the University of the Philippines campus in Diliman, where we live, and we knew why. Many thousands of high school seniors hoping to enter UP were taking the university’s UPCAT or entrance exam, which had gone back to its old physical, face-to-face format after two years of being suspended in favor of a statistical formula because of the pandemic. This year, over 100,000 applicants took the UPCAT, out of whom about a tenth will be taken in, the actual number of admissions being determined by the capacity of UP’s eight “constituent universities” like UP Los Baños and UP Mindanao, aside from Diliman, to absorb new freshmen.

As a campus resident and now a retired professor who still teaches a course every semester (an option I avail myself of, just to keep my foot in the classroom and know what the young people are thinking), I witness this ritual every year, and smile every time I see those bright and eager faces, squinting at the sun and looking a little lost; the first challenge every UP freshman faces is finding out where things are and the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B.

That’s literally thinking on your feet, which is a survival skill we inculcate in our students. If there’s a smarter way to solve a problem than brute force, we’ll find it. (I recall how, in the middle of an exam for a Shakespeare class which I usually aced, I was stumped for the right answer, and in despair just responded with a quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “So quick bright things come to confusion!” My professor let me off with a 1.25.)

Frankly or perhaps unkindly, UP people are called pilosopo, magulang or maangas by those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the forthrightness and cleverness that our academic culture encourages. At worst, we’re called “godless communists” by those who don’t see how packed our chapels and parking lots are (although of course, today, the most successful communists are called oligarchs). On this point, I can guarantee you that no one can be more annoyed if not enraged by a UP person than another UP person; our faculty feuds are legendary. Indeed that has become a liability with some employers who prefer to hire graduates who will simply do as they’re told without asking “Why?”

“Why?” may indeed be the wrong entry-level thing to say, but it’s also what has moved science and society forward, quickly followed by “How?” If no one asked it, we’d still be chasing animals over clifftops for food and sacrificing our first-borns for bigger harvests. This urge to apply reason to the most basic of human and natural functions again can be occasionally irritating, especially when it is accompanied by the unflinching (or perhaps juvenile) certitude that one is absolutely right.

As a teenage activist in Diliman, I was sure that the only way out of the mess we were (and continue to be) in was an armed revolution; Marxist logic said so. Approaching 70, I’m just glad that I lived long enough to reason my way out of it, but looking back at that pimply 17-year-old who carried Harry Shaw’s College English in one hand and Mao’s Little Red Book in the other, I can understand why I thought the way I did. And no, it wasn’t like my professors force-fed me with rebellious notions. I was a reasonably bright kid who read the news – murders and massacres here, extreme poverty and hunger there, corruption and scandal all around, with few of our leaders seeming to care – and I was looking for a comprehensive and compelling framework to explain all this and map out a route forward. The Left offered that.

It’s important to note that then, as now, most UP students and certainly most Filipino students didn’t feel the same way and do as I and my comrades did, which was to put activism over academics. Our protests may have hogged the headlines and typecast UP for good as a school for rebels (although it had been a hotbed of student protest since Quezon’s time), but the majority of UP students then continued attending their classes, turning in their assignments and picking up their diplomas, as was their right. Like I often emphasize, as vocal dissidents, we were (and are) in a distinct minority. That comes with the territory of resistance – not just in a university but in society as a whole.

Given what’s happened since, were we wrong to protest and did we waste our youth (and, as some politicians and red-tag-happy trolls might say, our people’s money as well)? Some of us persisted and stayed on that path; many paid with their lives, or devoted the entirety of their lives to their cause. Some turned 180 degrees and now rabidly renounce their past, casting their lot with their former enemies. Some, like me, now see moderate liberalism as the only viable way forward – to endure and survive, gaining ground from one generation and one community to the next, instead of in one fell swoop. Somehow I understand all of these outcomes, which are all human, all fallible, and none of them assured of success. I can only be hopeful, and not certain, that my option is the best one.

As I looked at the UPCAT examinees posing for selfies in front of the Carillon and the Oblation in Diliman, I remembered that eight UP students are now facing charges for their recent attempt to storm past a closed door at Quezon Hall to protest an unpopular decision by the Board of Regents. Among the complainants’ grievances, ostensibly, was that the wooden door was part of UP’s heritage, and had to be protected at all costs.

That saddened me, because the last image that one could imagine to stand for a university like UP is that of a closed and impregnable door. UP’s true heritage doesn’t lie in its furniture but in its tradition of free speech, and even of protest, the occasional overflow of passion included. I can only pray that UP’s new and compassionate president, Jijil Jimenez, can draw on his own activist past to see that point, and to keep an open door for his constituents to his mind and heart.

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Email me at [email protected] and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.