Top university changes educational, physical landscape of Angeles City

ANGELES CITY, Philippines - Local folk are marking this month an event that changed this city’s intellectual, nay, even physical landscape.

On May 10, 1931, this city’s first private school, Angeles Academy, was founded. It was the precursor of the Angeles Institute of Technology, which was founded on May 25, 1962. These evolved into the Angeles University Foundation (AUF), reputed to be one of the biggest and most modern universities north of Metro Manila, and whose attached hospital, the AUF Medical Center, is also recognized as one of the best hospitals capable of organ transplants.

The AUF has provided not only Pampanga, but the rest of Central Luzon, many working professionals in various fields: medicine, nursing, engineering, criminology, education, and even politics.

Along MacArthur highway in Barangay Lourdes, the location of AUF continues to change local landscape, with many business establishments sprouting from opportunities provided by the thousands of university students from various parts of Central Luzon and beyond.

This, in contrast to the nightspots that mushroomed near the gate of the former US military bases a few kilometers away in Barangays Balibago and Malabanias.

Birth of an Academy

Dr. Emmanuel Angeles, former president of AUF, recalled that the university was started as Angeles Academy on May 10, 1931 by his mother, Barbara Yap-Angeles, who was then still single, as she was to marry mechanic Agustin Angeles only in August the following year. The academy was initially located elsewhere in Barangay Pampang, in a lot donated under certain conditions by the Dayrit family amid lack of a local high school.

“The funds for the first building came as a gift from my mother’s brother Ildefonso. The academy took in children of local prominent families as soon as it opened,” he said.

Two years later, Mrs. Angeles went on maternity leave. That was when the principal whom she had appointed, in an act that took her by surprise, convinced teachers and students to move to another new school, the Holy Angel Academy, Emmanuel recalled.

He said that when his mother came back, the classrooms were empty and so she decided to close the academy, shelving in the meantime her zeal as educator to attend to her growing family. In 1946, though, she again tried to revive her school, but circumstances led instead to the founding of yet another school by her supposed collaborator.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Angeles told Emmanuel, who had wanted to become a pilot, to take up law instead. He did at the Ateneo and passed the bar in 1961.

“I was challenged by my mother’s zeal for education and the unfortunate events that prevented her from reviving her school,” Emmanuel said.

With her savings of only P5,000, Mrs. Angeles bought a mimeograph machine, a second-hand typewriter, a ream of bond paper and a box of carbon paper for documents needed for her to apply for permits for the establishment of the Angeles Institute of Technology in 1962, in the same site of the AUF now.

“A total of 611 students enrolled and we had 11 teachers for high school and college,” Emmanuel recalled.

Education for the poor

At the time the institute was being inaugurated, fire was engulfing the market building downtown. “We took in children of the fire victims as scholars and to pay for the salaries of our teachers, my mother had to again pawn her jewelry,” Emmanuel recalled.

The school became so financially hard up that the Angeles family had at one time offered it for sale. But there were no takers.

In 1968, Emmanuel took over the financial management of the school and on Aug. 16, 1971 the institute, now financially healthy, became a university. Mrs. Angeles was installed as president, the first woman to occupy such a post in Central Luzon.

On Dec. 4, 1975, the university was transformed into a foundation, as proposed by Emmanuel, with the late Sen. Jose Roy as chairman of the board. By then, all the school’s debts had been paid and Mrs. Angeles’ pawned jewelry had been redeemed by Emmanuel for his mother.

In 1976, Emmanuel was installed AUF president. The following year, his mother passed away.

AUF, however, has kept alive the initial intent of Mrs. Angeles to provide education for the poor. Twenty percent of the university’s students, including Aeta tribal folk, are scholars. The SGV auditing has revealed that the university has sponsored close to 50,000 students in scholarships worth some P505 million in the last 50 years.

This, even as the AUF Medical Center, which Emmanuel had founded in 1990, has had 9,922 charity patients whose bills worth some P12 million were shouldered by the hospital.