Back to school

It must be age, but I seem to be encountering school reunions more and more. While I am still a ways off from my jubilee, enough years have passed since my high school graduation for my classmates and me to seek a reconnection, a re-establishing of the bonds that saw us through four excruciating, exhilarating years. I should point out that this is only with my high school class; I have lost touch with my grade school classmates, and at the university there were too many of us with too diverse interests to form strong bonds.

In the last couple of years we have managed to–or rather, one of our classmates has–put together an updated directory, and the wonders of email have enabled us to keep in touch, and to even share chain emails. There is a serious effort to find a consensus on where to hold next year the mother of all reunions, which means most of the 40-plus people in our class. One classmate based in Canada is in charge of taking inventory on who lives where, and on which side of the Pacific this grand reunion will take place, and when, and in what form.

Thus I can appreciate the effort that must have gone into the jubilee reunion of Ateneo Class ’54 (see story on page 4) that will take place this Saturday. To have survived half a decade and come back to remember it is, indeed, something to celebrate.

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As a proud alumna, I am thrilled that the University of the Philippines has a new president–a woman at that, and UP through and through. It is upsetting though to realize that, like other public offices, even the academe is not spared from politics, from political paybacks and patronage, from characters not quite suitable aspiring for–and having a good chance at getting because of connections–the university’s top position. There should be divine retribution for those impure and unworthy souls who lust after positions in the academe and the arts in order to further ignoble ambitions, who see these as plums and prizes for political favors and opportunities for personal gain.

At the risk of being chastised for arrogance, the UP stands not just for academic and intellectual excellence, but as a bastion of freedom, idealism and even iconoclasm. It is where the best–or at least the better–young minds of the land can flex muscles and stretch boundaries and reach ever soaring heights.